After we left from the least classy place in Nevada, if not the universe, we drove all the way up to Washington. After a boring night in Zilla, which is apparently an illicit drug hotbed (as the folks in Seattle told us), we made our way up to Seattle.
On the drive up? Pulled over. Speeding. Crap.
The cop was a weirdo. Very round fellow with a nice moustache. He told me he was “giving me a break” on the ticket, even though he absolutely didn’t. He said when he came up to the car that he clocked me at 90 in a 75 zone. What did he write on the ticket? 90 in a 75. What a guy…
Since I am unemployed currently, I need a way to make some money (and not just to pay speeding ticket fines). One of my friends (who ate some delicious Penang with us in Philadelphia) needed some help with an idea of his.
This fellow:
Note: Pictures will be larger now. No one clicks on the thumbnail, so I figured this would be more helpful.
He basically wants to develop a cell phone application. Since my former employer paid me to create things that are pretty similar, I decided to help him out.
I cannot create an application from scratch, so I enlisted the help of some folks who I worked with previously. Before we left for the trip, and a little bit during the trip, we’ve been working on concepting the application and since the agency that we are working with is based in Seattle, I figured I’d drop in for an in person meeting.
We had that meeting.
Boring.
After the meeting, we headed out for some dinner with the folks from the agency. We had a bit of time to kill before the dinner reservations were activated, so we stopped in for a bit of touristness. The first (and last) tourist stop we made was at this strange little curiosity shop down by the water, It had all kinds of weird stuff on the walls and for sale. The best of the weirdness was definitely the mummies:
Actual mummies with hair. Kind of gross, but still kind of awesome.
After our quick stop at the mummy house, we had a short walk up to a restaurant that I love a lot. A whole heckuva lot.
Why do I love it so much? Well, it’s basically a buffet with waiters; instead of a crappy buffet with chicken fingers and pizza or whatever, it’s a buffet with skewers of incredible meat.
Ipanema is a Brazilian steak house. On each table is a card with one green side and one red side. If you or anyone at your table wants a waiter or four to keep on bringing food, leave the card on the green side (green means go, duh). If everyone is full or tired of eating, flip it to red and get your check.
The food that is peddled is really tasty. It’s just skewer after skewer of a different type of meat. The waiter carries said skewers to your table and if you want whatever is on the skewer, he cuts you a nice slice that you get to eat, It’s a great system. I wish it was at my apartment.
Pork, lamb, chicken (wrapped in bacon) and all kinds of beef (tri-tip, sirloin, bacon wrapped Kobe, filet minion, Swiss cheese filled tri-tip, pepper steak, and all kinds of others that I’ve forgotten about) made it’s way to our table and we ate until everyone was full. I was the last one full (it took probably forty five minutes straight of eating) and wished I could continue.
What I have described is awesome in and of itself. I would eat at a place like this even if the meats were mediocre. The vast majority of the meats at Ipanema were incredible. Everything was well cooked (most perfectly so), moist and high quality. The best of the bunch was likely the cheese filled steak and Kobe beef.
I don’t have any pictures of the feed, as I didn’t really want to take twenty pictures to capture everything that was offered. I did snap one of Tom and Amanda (not my wife, but Tom’s lady friend) focusing on their delicious selections:
The best part about having dinner with the folks who own a creative agency after a business meeting? They picked up the check. Kaboom.
Regrettably, I didn’t snap a picture of everyone, but thanks for the free food and excellent, non-business conversation Tom, Mike, Ashleigh, and Brad. Sadly, Dan, who also runs the agency, wasn’t able to attend, but since he is a partner there, the meal came out of his pocket too. Thanks.
After dinner, a few of the folks (the ones who apparently like their kids/significant others) made their ways home. Mike and Ashleigh (who are apparently lukewarm on their families) showed us the way to a sterling Ice Cream shop not too far away. Ashleigh knew of the place and told us it would definitely be worth the stop in:
Molly Moon’s is an organic home made ice cream shop. They use, I think, local ingredients and despite the fact that it hopped on the organic bandwagon, it doesn’t taste like crap. It’s super delicious.
I had the chocolate, which apparently used chocolate bars from a local chocolate company:
I enjoyed it greatly:
It was rich an chocolaty. Since it was made using actual chocolate bars, instead of whatever the hell they use in regular chocolate ice cream, it was almost imperceptibly grainy, but in a great way. The texture was pretty perfect.
Nice work Ashleigh.
After dessert, we went our separate ways. our way was back to the hotel for some sleep.
The next day, we had some boring hotel breakfast and started to head over to the Space Needle, which was a five minute walk from the hotel. Luckily, before we even left the hotel lobby, we got to see grown man, presumably about to go to a business meeting (as he was talking business with someone else) wearing this thing:
Yup.
A Looney Tunes, Back In Action Movie jacket. What? How is it in such great shape? I don’t know exactly when that movie debuted, but it was a looooong time ago; I’m sure of that. What a weirdo.
After that great day starter, we walked over to the Needle:
It’s really tall and all kinds of 70’ss pace age ugly. Really very ugly. Luckily, the view from the top is sterling:
After the Needle, we checked out and got down to business. That business being leaving Seattle and making our way back to Oregon.
Before we got to Oregon, we had to eat lunch. We stopped in a tiny little town (Chehalis) and stopped in here:
We ordered our pizza from a tan woman and sat down to wait for it. There was a stack of local newspapers nearby, so Amanda grabbed one and we flipped through it. It had some hilarious local stories, as well as some Thanksgiving themed jokes/riddles in it. What else was in it? Terrible grammar, of course:
Not only is that “importantly” somewhere in this story, but the editor decided to highlight it. The editor. The person who is paid US dollars to make sure that the grammar is correct. They made the decision to make sure their really awful mistake was the focus of this page. Ugh.
*Aside* – At my old job, I spent a few hours fighting to get an egregious grammar error fixed. Sadly, the folks that understood that it was, in fact, an error couldn’t do much about it. The folks that wanted to keep the error and launch the promotion without editing it used the following logic: “This has been through three outside agencies and no one has said anything about it. It’s staying.”
If you’d like to have some fun, see if you can pick out the error by clicking here. I’ll let you in on the secret at the end of this post. *Aside Over*
The pizza finally came to our table and we dug in:
Half mushroom and pepperoni, half sausage and green pepper. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. It was also a little on the green peppery side for certain.
Once we’d finished up, we headed out into the tiny town and spotted this:
Throughout the entire trip, I had needed a haircut. I was holding out until finding a small town barber, complete with spinning barber pole (and bonus barber pole sticker on the window). This place is what I was looking for.
We went inside and found this sign:
There are a couple of things on this sign that I found funny. The best thing? There is a list for “men”. There is also another column with the price list for “woman”. Now. Either Anthony only cuts/styles/colors/etc one woman’s hair, or he has a different price list for every other woman out there. I wonder who that lucky woman is that gets her prices written while all other women have to guess?
Grammar, again, aside, I sat down in the barber chair, took a deep breath and got my hairs cut off:
Please note the length of the front of my hair.
After the Armenian barber Anthony draped the polyester smock over my lap, I told him what I wanted and he started. Here’s what I wanted: shave the sides using the number 3 guide on the trimmer. Once the sides were buzzed, trim the top using scissors and make sure that the different lengths have been blended upwards to get rid of any obvious lines. Pretty standard.
He very gingerly, like he was afraid to actually touch my scalp with the trimmers, shaved the sides. And I really do mean gingerly. He barely pushed them into my head at all. It was very strange.
Next up was blending the top and bottom. Again, he very carefully used the trimmers to blend things.
Lastly, he moved onto the top. Using scissors, he cut about three strands of hair. He seemed terrified to cut anything, and so he didn’t cut anything. He cut about a sixteenth of an inch off of, literally, three spots on the top of my heads, then trimmed up the right side of the front of my hair only (not the right side at all) and called it quits. I was stifling laughter the entire time. My sideward glances at Amanda were not helping.
Apparently in Armenia, hair cuts hurt or something. Maybe Armenians have nerves in their hair? I don’t know. All I know is:
That’s my current haircut. The hair on the top of my head was exactly the same length as it was when I walked into Anthony's. I am very happy with the results. No I’m not.
After the cut, we headed back to the car and drove back into Oregon. Scenery everywhere. The coast is super nice. I recommend it highly.
The next update will include a bunch of different panoramas of the west coast. Heads up.
Oh, and here’s the grammar mistake in that link: “WIN A SUV”. It should be “WIN AN SUV”. Since the first letter of the acronym in that phrase starts with a vowel sound (“es”), “an” should be used. The reason that they stuck with “a”? “Since when you say ‘sport utility vehicle’, you use ‘a’, it should stay ‘a’. What a bunch of idiots. Just say it out loud and you know it’s not correct. WIN A ES YOO VEE. This infuriated me for days.
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