My college reunion, a.k.a. how I ate my way through Philadelphia

Hadar
Originally uploaded by Pookah.

First and foremost: the picture of Hadar relates in no way to eating my way through Philadelphia. She made it through the weekend safely, with only mental scars to haunt her for the rest of her life.

In any case, I'm a good week and then some late on making this post. I had promised you all guilt or co-conspiracy in the last blog entry, and I have held out for as long as I could. Actually, if it were up to the one remaining brain cell of mine that is functional, I would not be sitting here right now, broadcasting to the world...

So a week (and change) ago Thursday, I took the train up to Philly. Luckily, after staying up all night ripping CDs of our Class of 2001 personalized yearbooks (go me! Waay to procrastinate), I woke up just in time to depart in the city of Brotherly love.

My first order of business was to get me some Monk's food and libations, and yeah, Nishchay was there too. I would have taken pictures had I not been so busy shoving food into my face.

As you can see from my sidebar (see righthand side of my blog), I am a big proponent of Monk's so don't take this next criticism too seriously (i.e. I will be back). I ordered the mussels and it felt like I was eating sandpaper. NOT the way I wanted to start out my culinary trek through Philadlephia. The good news is that you can't screw up a rasberry lambic - as Anthony says, it will always taste like Robitussin. So I had two, just to keep the doctors away.

The waitress was wonderful, however, and offered us free dessert, which Nishchay happily ordered (you little glutton you!).

Next up: tracking down one Mr. Christopher Kessler (my god! He DOES have a first name!), my host-with-the-most for the weekend. He warned me that the Pete n' Mumbles B&B was formerly a fraternity house so I should not be fooled by the very grown-up looking living room and kitchen area.

He was right. I pulled a mattress out of a stack on the wall of this room with water stained and peeling walls. The furniture may well have been left over from previous tenants, and there was an adorable coloring book picture of a hippo by the mirror which said, "To Tom Love Athena." The boys thought it was cute so they never took it down when they moved in.

I know I definitely got clean sheets, but the blanket was in a pile already in the room. Of course, the other choice was one that even Mumbles said, "I wouldn't use that one. It was here when we moved in." Clearly that translates into: "we have never washed it so use that blanket at your own risk." I heeded the warning and pretended my own blanket choice was clean. (Needless to say, I slept fully clothed at night.)

All this makes me sound ungrateful, but it was the true reunion experience. It totally brought me back to my good old days at Penn when I used to party at PiLam with Mumbles and the rest of the party crew. The bathrooms were so sketchy that I even piddled on their neighbors roof one time. Ahhh, memories...

That L.A. whore Erin joined us at the castle o' fraternity love and at 9PM sharp, Mumbles, Pete and I traipsed with her to Bluegrass night (Flat Possum Boys - can't find their website). If I were at all the observant girl you've all pretended I am, I would be able to tell you what bar we went to, but I'm afraid that, sober as I was, I have zero clue. All I know is that there is Ethiopian food somewhere nearby, and it's only a block or so from 46th & Locust.

The creepy thing is that the bar is built in an old row-home. When you walk in, you feel like you've just broken into and entered someone's house.

Needless to say, we were amongst the first arrivals. And what, to our wondering eyes, did appear? No, no, not Santa and his eight little reindeer, but rather one rather infamous JJ. Granted, he lives only three blocks away from the unknown bar, but it is astounding how many times I run into this boy. He certainly gets around.

Well, I took some very interesting photos of the bluegrass crew, and it's the sober pictures that make us look most hammered. Such a credit to my mad photography skills. (Speaking of which, I SO want to steal Mumbles' new Nikon D-50 camera! What an absolute dream...!)

The bluegrass band was pretty amazing and so was the Dogfish Aprihop. In other news, the Yuengling bottles really wet Erin's whistle (something about the ten frames I have of her deep-throating the neck of the bottle).

I kept doing a double-take at one of the bar staff because he looks like a body double for Daniel Day Lewis, and the band kept threatening to stop playing for us because we were getting too loud. I figured all they had to do was invest in one simple microphone and the world would be all glorious again, but they seem to like telling the 40 drunk people in a 12'X12' room to shut the hell up. Oh, and the lead singer (who incidentally also owns the bar) was randomly doing shots of high-grade tequila while he was singing.

After many shout-outs to our favorite word (PENIS!), Erin was escorted home by her friend from AmeriCorps. I was told that Erin had a minor accident with her dad's car when she tried to return it by 5AM on Friday morning. Don't worry, folks, she lived - if only to be out-gangstered by Pete the next evening.

I was probably in bed by 1AM, but any of you who know the post-Penn Ryan realize that 1AM is a good three or four hours past my bedtime so I was pretty pooped. Yet my damn internal clock woke me by 6:30AM. The only plus side to this scenario is that Michelle's red-eye was due in by ass-early that morning too.

Eventually I found her at the new coffee shop on Penn's campus, Gia Pronto (NOTE to current Penn students - excellent friggin' coffee!). She represented all that is L.A. by scarfing down a huge coffee and a bag of apple slices. And I, like the happy morning person I am, slathered a bagel in way too much cream cheese and happily inhaled my own coffee - did I mention how good the coffee is?

We got back to the B&B before Mumbles left for work and installed Michelle on the left half of the mattress in the scary "guest room." We chatted so long that Mumbles was late for work and had to take a cab. Ha ha.

Okay, I need a break...