La Creperie, Arlington, VA

Last night after work Tony wanted to go shopping, so we headed to Pentagon City. Along the way, we decided to grab an early dinner, since he'd not lunched yet, and found La Creperie amidst all those restaurants and shops which are outside the main "Fashion Centre at Pentagon City" in an area called Pentagon Row.

I really enjoyed my dinner, which was a stew of chicken and mushrooms in a chicken broth enriched with cream followed by an enormous salad maison with freshly made mayonnaisse as the dressing. For dessert, I just had a tiny cup of French roast espresso. Tony started with a fine pate in aspic, then ate a salmon and cream cheese crepe for his plat, and an apple cinnamon crepe with vanilla ice cream for dessert. I liked this creperie, cause they used great big crepes instead of little tiny pancake sized ones. Tony's salmon crepe was folded over in half much like a quesadilla and the apple dessert crepe was wrapped into a sort of flat burrito shape.

All evening I kept trying to order my food in French from our obviously French waitress, but she kept quizzically repeating me in English like she wasn't able to understand me. Now, I'll be the first to admit that my French sucks, but I couldn't have been that far off on either vocabulary or accent, or Tony would have lectured me about my errors, as he always does. I guess she was just being like the waiters in Paris. Parisians can be so obnoxious. They generally always speak impeccible English, but they feign ignorance and make Americans struggle with their French, and then they still pretend the Americans are incomprehensible, even though they probably eavesdropped on the table ahead of time, hearing the Americans discussing their menu choices amongst the table.

Saint Patrick's Day in D.C.

Tony met me at the airport tonight, and after we dropped my luggage off at home we headed out for a St. Patrick's Day dinner. Even though it was after ten p.m., all of the Irish or Celtic related restaurants were absolutely jam-packed with drunken faux-Irishmen, so the only place we could find that was 1) halfway calm and 2) still open was the Afterwards Cafe.

After we were seated and got our Irish coffee orders in, what did we notice but the two business men at the adjacent table (adjacent at this cafe means the tables are barely a foot apart!) to ours were real live Irishmen! One was from Northern Ireland and one was from Ireland, and they were in town today with the McCartney sisters who were visiting the White House to discuss problems with the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Fein.

Albuquerque

What is it about this town and green chiles? Everywhere I go to eat, the food is full of green chiles. I just had a nice buffet dinner at the Sandia Casino (I only won $10.50 more than I started with tonight), and the food was all redolent with chiles. And this afternoon, I pulled through the McDonald's drivethrough, and my $1 double cheeseburger had a green chile on it! It was the same last month when I was here....the only place that didn't have green chiles in the food was Starbucks. Oh, well. I guess it's a tourist thing. I'd rather they did blue corn tortillas, though.