Denver, Day 1

It's 10:30 and my first day in Denver is over. After spending the day before in a sweaty rock gym shouting over club music loud enough to clear my chronicly clogged ears and coming home at midnight to pack franticly for a 7:00AM flight, I managed to sleep the majority of the way to the city. The stopover in Dallas was perfect. Just long enough to grab something to eat and get onto the next plane.

As we were decending into Denver Airport I started to finally realize what was going on.

Denver is in the middle of nowhere. I know I joke about how Hamilton is for all intents and purposes in the middle of nowhere, but Denver is actually in the middle of nowhere. I went from the most densely populated state in the union to the 37th, and apparantly more than half of Colorado's entire population is in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area. I've flown over this area of the US a number of times now, and have always been facinated by the vast tracks of quilted farmland stretching out on both ends of the horizon, with nothing but a few pitiful dots of forest and some jagged rivers for diversity. This time I ended up landing in it. At that point the 'what the hell have I gotten myself into' part of the trip hit me.

It was about 2PM by the time I was into the city and ready to explore. Some quick stats of day 1:

Beggars seen - 6
Ratio of people who asked me for change compared to those who were just hanging around with signs - 1:1
Libraries Found - 1
Bookstores Found -1
Libraries and bookstores that informed me that the chances of my getting a job there were worse than 0 - 2
Pictures taken - 5
Times I've gotten lost - 0 (A miracle and an anomoly all at once)
Overall opinion of the city so far, after 3 streets, and a few hours (from 1 to 10) - 3

Like Jersey and Hawaii, the state of Colorodo is in a hiring freeze. The chances that I will end up in a public library are very slim at this point, and besides, there would be an LIS to get first. I still have a number of bookstores to check out, and the college campus. There's apparantly going to be a festival on Saturday, so I'll go there too. I think at this point a lot is depending on the campus itself and the vibe I get there. This city is so tiny I don't know if I would be able to manage living here for any length of time, but life is nothing if not a series of interesting challenges!

The Photos from Today:

I wasn't very dilligant in playing the tourist snapping at everything. The area the hotel is in looks a little tougher than the metropolitan heart of the city, and so I took the inconspicuous route for the time being.

"Yaki Soba Tofu" I guess you could call this that. It wasn't bad. The tempura was surprisingly edible, considering how picky I am about tempura.

Some guy in the Japanese place playing with a twin lens reflex camera. After passing laundrymats, liquer stores, and similar institutions of the baser elements of city life, seeing someone with a TLR was my first whiff of something interesting in the city.

Interior of the Japanese restaurant. The menu was injet printer fare, did not look like any Japanese menu I had ever seen, and the man in front of me was asking if Kirin beer was some sort of Japanese lager. I had some misgivings.

A view of the Denver skyline. That's pretty much all of it. Behind that is the Rockies, which is a much more impressive view. The image of nothing but flat farmland on one side of you and a gigantic wall of snowy mountains on the other commands an apprecation for the amazing diversity of the country and geography in general.