Yesterday was the best day I've had in a while. Today was a total flop.
Let's start from the top.
The Penrose Library is in the midst of renovation, and invited the campus to come to a "chair tasting," in which we sit in a few dozen chairs and tell them how we feel about them. I was on campus for something else, so I figured I'd stop by and see this silliness. I ended up spending an hour sitting in various chairs and scoring them on comfortableness, aesthetics, and durability, and at the end of it I got a voucher for coffee.
That was the start of the weirdness.
After that, I decided I wanted ramen. The craving for ramen can develop into an obsession, and with only one semi-decent ramen house to be found in the city, it's also a bit of a rare treat. So I go driving off to get ramen. I end up stuck behind a vehicle doing fifteen under the speed limit half a mile by my exit, and since I'm already in a cloud of wanderlust and cabin fever from the weekend blizzard, I decide I will try passing, and if I miss the exit I will keep driving. I miss the exit, so I keep driving.
I get off a couple stops after, am vaguely lost, and drive around until I see an sign for a Korean BBQ place. Well, I haven't been to a Korean restaurant since I got to Denver, so I figure, why not? The only problem is that the turn in is behind me. So I keep going, and turn into the next parking lot, which happens to have an antique mall in it. It's around three thirty by this point, not really supper time yet, so I figure, what the hell, I'll browse.
The mall is set up as a series of displays owned by sellers who probably rent the space. Along the wall there are a few separate rooms, one of which is nothing but watches and cameras. I figure it's lucky that the pocket watch I was looking at was over a hundred bucks, or I might have tricked myself into thinking I could afford it.
After trawling around for possible book finds (lots of books, all of them worthless), I stepped out, prepared to have something to eat. Only, just then I noticed a "deli" in the same complex as the antique mall. It was a Russian market, and since I was already there and out of the car, I decided to go inside. Ended up with a bunch of preserved fish and a real hankering for deli meats, but my mind was still on Korean.
So now I think I'm going to get to the restaurant. Only, when I drive into the strip mall I find myself parked in front of an English tea house, advertising food and gifts along with sit down dining. So I go in there too. One of my classmates used to bring in a box of PG Tips last quarter, and lo and behold, there was a bunch of that in stock, so I figured, well, I just ran out of black tea, and this stuff doesn't show up at safeway, so I'll grab it.
As I'm walking to the restaurant I pass an African Market, so I go in there too. Lots of grains and spices in that one, and a hair salon in back. I was almost tempted to get one of the many DVD stacked up front, just to see what Congolese cinema was like, but I have enough crap in my room right now, so I passed on that.
So after a stroll around Russia, a stop in England, and a quick detour to Africa, I finally made it to Korea.
And man. That food was GOOD. Korean is hot in a strange way that is comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. I don't tend to like spicy food. I don't like spicy Thai, and I hate spicy Mexican, but there's something about spicy Korean that I am willing to suffer through. It helps that I made an excellent menu decision. It was hard to make, considering all the soups, noddles, and grilled selections looked equally mouthwatering, but I finally went with a beef, dumpling, and rice cake soup, partially because it looked less dangerously orange in the picture.
It was a good thing I chose that too, because it unexpectedly came with 7 sides, all of which were amazing. Banchan is one of the most marvelous culinary inventions of all time. Multiple sauces and textures of varying heat, all in little portions so you can eat a lot of different stuff and still get full. They're all extremely simple, but perfect together. A few use this thick sauce that is sweet when you first eat it and then becomes surprisingly hot after the first few seconds. They put it on veggies, seaweed and broccoli. SO GOOD. And when my tongue started aching all I had to do was drink more soup, which was not spicy at all, and reset my palate perfectly. I ate more in that sitting than I had in a single meal for weeks.
And when I was done I was given a complimentary desert drink, a sort of barley tea that was ultrasweet. The gross mouth feeling you get when you've eaten a lot of hot food was instantly gone.
And all of this for 11 bucks.
This couldn't have come at a better time. The day before I had tried chicken fried steak at a local diner and hated it. It tasted like I was eating oil and batter and gravy and nothing else. A few days before that I had gone out with a friend to a Japanese restaurant, and took a risk on their ramen. That was also almost inedible, and again tasted like eating oil.
So I was so happy that I had found a place that was not only relatively cheap, but was really, really good.
Today was almost the opposite of that experience. Again I had to go driving somewhere, but this time I had a definite destination and a time limit. There was an SLA meeting at the Denver Tech Center, which is basically this huge chunk of the city where massive office buildings are surrounded by massive car parks. In other words, it represents everything I hate about car culture.
The DTC is only 15 minutes away, but once I got there I spent 45 minutes driving in circles, trying to find the building the event was supposed to be in. Eventually I decided the effort wasn't worth the gas and drove back home to "attend" the event online. Unfortunate, considering I had registered and paid, and had a meal waiting for me at the building that I could not find because the roads were not designed to make sense and the buildings were not designed to be easily accessible. And it was ironic too, since the speaker for the evening was a gentleman who was all about sustainability and the alteration of our social structures to better support our core values.
If I ruled the world, you can bet the first alteration I would make would be in bulldozing that entire god-forsaken zone down and replacing it with something that made sense.
