Text 24800, 94 rader
Skriven 2009-06-08 08:16:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: PA trip 696
===================
I'm building my numbers up, as I may be away for a few days.

US1023 BOS PHL 0630 0756 734 4A

The flight was fine and fast. Courteous though uninvolved
FA service. Nothing to write home about, but I got there.

US4118 PHL IPT 1051 1144 DH8 2A

Unfortunately, my seat unaccountably changed from the exit
shady side window to the noisiest sunny side window, and I
didn't notice. Ah, well, I carry earplugs and eyeshades with
me, and my legs aren't super super long. Which reminds me,
though. My buddies were watching Dancing with the Stars last
night, and I demonstrated my high kicking prowess ... which
would have been fine, except I forgot, in my eagerness to
impress a young lady, that I can't kick my left leg as high
any more. Threw the damned left butt out, and it was pretty
unpleasant sitting in the Dash 8 seat. More Benadryl made
it easy to snooze through the flight, though.

Annie and Billy were there to pick me up and drag me to
Ichiban, a sushi parlor run by an assortment of Chinese and
Indonesians. I went against sanity and went for raw fish,
which actually was pretty fresh and pretty well prepared.

Present: Annie and Billy, Merinda, Mike Lamade, and myself.

The sashimi lunch consisted of three slices each of escolar,
sea bass of some kind, yellowfin tuna, and salmon. All were
good examples, and only the tuna had a whiff of less-than-
freshness. Rice was average, more American than Japanese.
For some reason the escolar didn't have the embarrassing
Olestra-like effects that it usually does. The lunch came
with an average miso soup with lots of seaweed and an
average iceberg salad with an average miso-based dressing.
Billy, being immunosuppressed, looked enviously at the raw
fish; he, Annie, and Merinda all had the shrimp tempura.
I tried this: the shrimp were fine, though the batter
was too thick; vegetables were mostly normal but had a
couple odd additions, including large taro, which someone
pawned off on me as eggplant.

I also ordered an agedashi dofu appetizer for the table,
but everyone else steered away from it; it was of a
decent standard.

Sapporo beer was a good accompaniment to all.

=
A nice dinner, especially delicious as I didn't fix it.

Annie had marinated lamb leg chunks in a supposedly Moroccan
spice mixture and grilled them on the Weber; veggie kebabs
on the side. She was supposed to make couscous but forgot,
so we scrounged a loaf of French bread from someplace. Fruit
tart and double chocolate cake, both from Wegmans, both
decent commercial product, for afters. Harissa from Sur la
Table was a particularly piquant product, including a fair
measure of Moroccan-style salted lemon in the mix; good, but
a little went a very long way, and not because of the heat.

Localish beers:

Yuengling Light - not bad, low hops, clean tasting, good for
quenchment but not doing all that much for the taste buds

Yuengling Light Lager - not surprisingly, similar, but a bit
more cereally

Straub - somewhere between a real beer and an American one,
with a bit of tartness and character; I enjoyed this local
product; a bit of a surprise

Iron City - a big surprise, as it has the reputation for
being cheap bellywash a la Blatz, Haffenreffer, Schaefer,
and so on: turned out to be a decent mainstream brew, not
very characterful, but not Old Frothingslosh either.

Unlocalish beers:
On our trip to Corning, see below, we found Tiger, Singha,
and Sapporo at Wegmans. Annie, who has fond memories of Asia
trips with Billy, bought them out. At least Billy can close
his eyes and think of Chiangmai.

Also, for some unknown reason, she bought a case of Molson
Light in anticipation of a friend who drank cheap light
beer (despite the fact that we had cases of the two light
Yuenglings). I had one - surprisingly well hopped, nice,
clean, refreshing. I'd do it again.

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