Pah - rum - pah - pum - pum!

Few interesting noticings from my time in the Reagan Airport (kinda presumptuous of me to say that they’re interesting eh? Yeah, I like it.)

I think it’s common knowledge that food/beverages in international airports is just absurdly overpriced. Everybody knows it and hates it but there’s just nothing you can do about it.

So here I am, hungry and fully aware that some restaurant in the airport is about to just punch me in the gut at the register. I picked my poison and chose Panda Express because I’m some kind of a freak for cheap, shizzy Chinese food. (shizzy…you like that word? Me too.) I informed the PE employee that I would like a large order of fried rice with orange peel chicken. “Also, could I get a drink…yeah…the large one.” I knew that I was finished. Going large and large was going to set me back in a major way. But then I see my total pop up on the screen! 6 dollars total!! WHAT?!

As it turns out, Panda Express is dirt cheap regularly because dirt cheap is literally the most that people are willing to pay for that food. Apparently that value ceiling doesn’t disintegrate when you go through airport security. Even though you’re in an airport where everything is supposed to be overpriced, people are still only willing to pay 4 bucks for some shizzy Chinese food. From now on, I’m running for the shiz every time I see it in an airport.

The beer in the picture below cost me 11 bucks. That is almost double what my entire meal cost at Panda. That is insane, awesome, sad, and mind-blowing. All at the same time.

I noticed another thing on my way into the airport terminal. As I was going through security, I was paying close attention to the people around me just trying to have some fun in my brain with noticing the little oddities. One thing I’ve noticed in the St. Louis airport these past 4-5 weeks is that the security conveyer belt seems to generate some static electricity. Thus, every time that people go to grab their bags, laptops, shoes, etc after they have gone through the scanners, they receive a nice little static electric shock! Once you know it’s going to happen, it’s pretty fun to watch people’s reactions. Thus, I was focusing most of my attention on the people on the other side of the scanners who were retrieving the items they had removed prior to going through security. The trend that I noticed was this:

When people are going to go through a scanner, two of the things that they are required to remove are their belt and their shoes. TSA should have thought this through before making it a rule. It seems that the general consensus is that people want to get their shoes back on first thing after going through the machine. Nobody wants to be out in public, standing on a dirty floor without his/her shoes on. I’d say 9 out of 10 people put their shoes on first before then donning their belt, jacket, hat, bags, watch, etc. This is all well and good except for one thing. Unfortunately, the TSA has required people to remove their belts.

Now, I’m not sure if you’re aware of the purpose of a belt so I’m going to iterate it for you. Generally, the purpose of a belt is to keep your pants from falling down. There are loops all around the waist of most pants that you run the belt through to ensure that the pants are kept up all the way around. You don’t want them falling down in the front, the back, or definitely not the sides (gross, exposed hips in public). PLEASE NOTE: some people do not wear belts to keep their pants up. There is a growing number of women wearing belts for strictly ornamental reasons. Please do not send me an angry email about how I limited the purpose of belts. I hate those kinds of emails.

So what happens when you make someone remove his/her belt prior to bending down far enough to put on his/her shoes and tie them back up? Well, you end up with a lot of unwanted butt-cleavage showing. I swear, I saw more butt-cleavage today watching the people going through airport security than I saw during the whole 4 hour Discovery Channel special I watched on “Plumbers and Their Cracks” (please note that I watched no such special as I do not believe it exists). The point though is that I got a nice laugh out of the situation and plan on spreading the word so that many others can enjoy the absurdity of the situation the next time they are going through airport security.

Lastly, I will just share a bit about the funniest man I saw today. I saw him coming from a ways away. He was a shorter little middle-eastern man. He had a wonderful sailor’s hat on and a semi-disgusting spread of facial hear. He had a big flowery carry-on bag which he was dragging behind him on 1 wheel (the other appeared to have been broken off) and he had a look of utter stress on his face. Oh yeah, did I mention that he was absolutely flying through the airport (pun)? This dude was BOOKING IT. You could tell he was obviously late for his flight and was kind of on the far side of freaking out about it. The best thing about him was that, it wasn’t is appearance that first led me to notice him. It was this sound he was making as he flew through the terminal. It was kind of like a “thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack!” I heard it from long off and kind of wondered about it. It was only once he was right upon me that I realized he was wearing some SWEET Abercrombie & Fitch flip-flops! (side-note: it’s winter.) He was making so much noise as he ran by. I think it’s safe to say though that he made up my mind when it comes to running through an airport in flip-flops. If I was considering it before, I am definitely not anymore.

The best part of the whole thing was that, right as I had forgotten about him, I saw him again. He walked back past me! Hahah he had obviously missed his flight but he didn’t look pissed or stressed or anything. His countenance had completely changed. He was some kind of a mixture between dejected and completely amused. As he walked by, his body language and posture suggested a tragedy on the level of losing a loved one (shoulders slumped in a powerful way, head hanging, and arms flopping at his side), however, he was smiling and laughing pretty hard under his breath. I would have gone to ask him what was up but he seemed to be pretty into the hilarious conversation he was having with himself. Just laughing his little head off while muttering stuff to himself.

I’ll leave it here and just say that it was a very entertaining hour and a half that I spent in the airport today. So many other fun observations but such an inability to write about them in a way that doesn’t use over a thousand words. Thus, I’m going to call it good for now and re-engage in conversation with the woman to my left on the plane who seems to be blown away that I’m already out of school. Apparently I “just look so young!”

Wonderful. Perfect. I miss YOU.

I like blogging about music so much more...expect music from my next blog.

This post is being posted over a week late...

*Yawn*

I’m worn out guys. Remind me to go to bed right when I get to my hotel tonight cause I seriously need to get some sleep. However energy-consuming though, this was a wonderful weekend.

Christian took a little trip up to the DC (that means District of Columbia everybody, not Drip Coffee) this weekend to visit one of his best friends ever. Second Lieutenant Nicholas Joseph Halsmer. Legitimacy incarnate.

We did lots of tight stuff like going camping on the Quantico Marine Base during the sub-freezing temperatures (it snowed…) with Nic’s friend Allan, his wife, and a 50 year old Belarusian who teaches Russian at the marine base. I feel like I could probably spend some serious time talking about this whole experience with a large amount of the time being consumed by stories about Igor (the Belarusian), but sadly, I’m not feeling like going there right now.

Skip to the next night. Lots of stuff happened between camping and the next night but that’s why I used the word “skip”…we’re going to skip it.

Saturday night, Nic and I had planned to go to a concert near DuPont Circle in DC (again, the District of Columbia), and we decided to go down to the city early enough to get a nice dinner. I was ready to have a legit meal that would give me a taste of the culinary prowess that DC (…) seems to possess. So, as I will probably always do from here on out when I’m looking for a new, legit restaurant in an area that I’m not familiar with, we consulted the iPhone app “Urban Spoon”.

It took us a good 30 minutes while we were on the metro to figure out what kind of food we wanted. We finally decided on a Mediterranean place though that was fairly close to the concert venue. It came highly rated. When we got there, you could immediately tell that it was a pretty swanky place. Most people there were full-on adults (35-50 yrs old) and seemed to be dressed a little better than we were. The hostess informed us that, unfortunately, tables were available by reservation only. However, due to the powerful presence of a Marine Second Lieutenant, they consented to give us a table that wasn’t reserved for another hour and a half and I guess just hope that we got out of there in time.

So we sat down at our table. First thing I did was open the wine list (it was immense). I flipped through it looking for a wine that wasn’t the cheapest they had but that wasn’t 100 bucks. I finally found a nice little Pino Noir that was “in our price range”. I’ll go ahead and say that it was one of the best wines I’ve ever had. Apparently Moldova knows how to grow some good Pino Noir grapes. Good on em.

We then opened the menu. We were informed that the way to do it at this restaurant was to just order like 5-6 different items. They were all made to be eaten with the never-ending (and delicious) flatbread.

The things we ordered are as follows (I don’t remember the actual names of these items, they were all in some other language):

1. An incredibly rich and creamy yogurt with walnuts and tart apples on top. Then it was surrounded by some sort of large, edible flower petals (yeah, we ate them), and then covered in a very virgin olive oil. This is the one you can see in the picture.

2. Pan seared Gouda with a tomato/basil glaze and a thick fig jam. It was an amazing mix of salty and sweet.

3. Goat Milk cheese with honeycomb. This cheese was insanely rich. You couldn’t eat more than a little bit of it at a time or it would freak your taste buds out (olas found this out). But then, if you got some of it and put it with the honey (maybe the best honey I’ve ever tasted) in the honeycomb, it was…aaaah I don’t even know how to describe how good it was. Luscious. It was luscious.

4. Ground lamb with tomato, onion, basil, and olive oil dressing. Pretty awesome lamb.

5. Last, but not least for sure, we had Kalamar (squid) stuffed with shrimp, mozzerella, and a bunch of green spices. Then it was sprinkled with lemon and olive oil. I’ve never had anything like this.

In the end, I feel pretty confident saying that it is easily in the top 5 meals I’ve ever eaten in my life. It might even take first place; I’m just not going to say that because I might be forgetting some other awesome meal that actually deserves the blue ribbon. I’ll give myself a little time to remember the other great meals I’ve had before I hang the gold medal around this meal’s neck.

So, after dinner we went over to this place called The Black Cat or, as the stamp on the back of our hands said, El Gato Negro. It was a pretty sweet venue: the type of place that you just don’t find anywhere in OK. We rocked the show with The Luyas first:

And then with the band we came to see, The Antlers:

All, in all, it was a wonderful night. On the metro ride back home, we made some “life-long friends” (their words, definitely not ours) who were kind of annoying, but at the same time were very entertaining. They were very very confused as to why Nic would be going to flight school if he’s not in the air force and also seemed to have some strong opinions about how lame Oklahoma is. Don’t worry though, we stood up for our state.

They also made lots of fun of my tweed blazer that I was wearing. They have no idea what they were talking about though. That jacket is the shiz (or at least I like it a lot).

Ok. Well…now I’m at a crossroads. I have a decision to make. I have about twice as much to say as I have said so far…meaning I’m about halfway through my material. I’m trying to decide if it’s a better idea for me to cut this post off here and start a second one or whether I should just make it one long motherload of a post…

I think, for your sake, I’ll split it into two posts. If you read both of them in one sitting though, then I’m impressed with you. Heck, if you read one of them in one sitting, I’m impressed.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I wasn’t going to mention this just because of all the people who it would make jealous, but then I realized that none of them will probably read my blog anyways. So I’ll go ahead and brag that I got to go to lunch and get coffee with THE Katie Deaninator on Friday. It was AwEsOmE. That girl is legit. Somebody swoop in and sweep that girl off her feet. You will be lucky you did.