Friday was a pretty busy/irritating day at work, so I was really glad that we had made plans earlier in the week to hang out with friends.
Jason and I hoofed it to Ghent, we were met up at No Frill for dinner with Joe. Awesome food/service (as always), and Jason’s entree deserves its own journal entry. The Emergency Alert System went off twice for “Tornado Warnings” on the drive out there. Kudos to them for finally getting a speech synthesizer than can fairly accurately pronounce the names of localities. It was hard not to laugh at the way it used to say “Chesapeake” (chest-a-pee-ack-e), and laughings really not appropriate when you know peoples houses are about to get blown to Oz.
After No Frill, Joe whisked us over the New Belmont where Vlad joined us. Vlad is a very cool guy from the Ukraine who just moved to Norfolk about a month ago to get his doctorate in International Studies at ODU. After a few drinks (and hearing that Vlad had only been to The Wave), we headed over to the Metro, which was pleasantly packed with hot people.
Well, “hot people” as in not that the people were all that great looking as much as the air conditioner wasn’t working — they were literally hot people. (Although the blonde in the Led Zepplin tshirt turned a few heads…) We bumped into a few friends (Chuck & Co., Stephen W, and Perry), which is always a treat. Had a few martinis (thankfully they had a barback, although it was the poor girls first night working there) and a great time talking. Vlad was very patient with answering all of my political questions, and was very frank with talking about his experiences with socalized medicine, having lived in eastern Europe.
The final stop was The Garage, and a big THANK YOU to Joe (our lovely driver) as he really didn’t want to stop there. We ended up only staying for around 30 minutes (which isn’t a bad thing), but we did get to hang out with Dan (and Brad), which was the only reason I wanted to stop. Vlad thanked us for taking him there, informing us that he’d probably never go back there again — and definately not alone. The kids got good taste, what can I say?
And for anyone counting, this is the second Garage visit (in a row, I might add) not ending in drama between Jason and I. w00t