top 5 g-rated hotel experiences

dear friends,

i am off to the big academic conference tomorrow and was just confirming the hotel's address. i was thinking about how i am probably more excited about the hotel than the conference. it has a rooftop pool!

in my adult life i travel enough on bidness that you would think i would hate hotels. perhaps it is because i did not grow up in a family that ever vacationed in hotels, but i still think they are quite a treat.

here are my top five g-rated hotel memories

(1) new york hilton- last year's big academic conference. got trashed with akm. made post last call decision to get a room since she was in no condition to drive us back to the jerz. all sold out. except for the couch part of a suite. walk of shame takes on whole new meaning when trying to avoid senior figures in your discipline.

(2) mailmaison, belfast- two words: posh goth

(3) hotel on rivington, LES- in 2005 this was still under construction... so i got my girls a room at very deep discount as a thanks for helping me move my crap to princeton. we didn't notice any noises. we did notice the views.

(4) the royal york, toronto- this is one of the homeland's great old hotels and as a manner of de-freaking myself i booked myself a room there the night before i wrote the gre the first time back during the queen's era. i wrote it again, and it wasn't quite the same freaking out in my montreak studio the night before.

(5) silver beach hotel, st. joseph michigan-picture it, beach-town michigan summer 2002. early in my friendship with brother-by-another-mother he decided we should take a little vacation from our intense summer school program. lesson learned: making guacamole in an ice machine bucket may be a great idea at night, but forgetting about it leaves a nasty looking mess for cleaning staff in the morning. (we could hear swearing as we exited and put it together half way back to south bend and felt bad)

perhaps if i get bored on the bolt bus back from boston i will blog a through review,

cam

trying new things: bulgarian food or adventures in phallic meats

dear friends,

long time no blog yadda yadda. i have been trying lots of new things of late. being heedless and impulsive as if my ann had an e.

last night elisha and i decided to try a local place we had never been. i thought i knew about eastern european food from my time in poland. but apparently i missed bulgarian. and i would have remembered this. the place we went to is owned by a former bulgarian professional soccer player and features what can only be described as phallic meats. i can't find an exact replica on the internet (mine had two bowls, one on each side that added to the effect)but here are some photos google image found me that might give you some idea.

but why stop there? the trying new things party was just getting started. we met up with some others and ventured to a certain resto/lounge in new brunswick that is about to close for a little fact finding mission (as lukas noted, this probably makes me the madeline albright of missed connections since only people in the united nations go on fact finding missions). this is also of course part of a whole other story involving a latent crush(a term which i am on the verge of urbandictionary-ing), the dude who made my tea for over a year, craigslist missed connections, me just being miley, technological unbalance, employees at my local record store and their bands (and their bands that have members that are kids of my professors), and perhaps most curiously ray romano. its all rather ridiculous and mostly amusing, except for the part where i morph from being the grown up, what you see is what you get, got my shit together version of me into the 1994 listening to this song all the time, wearing my vintage cjoh t-shirt and red zip up like alanis in her video, scared to say hi to boys who aren't my friends version of me.

i suppose the bottom line is that i need to be at least as metaphoriclly ballsy as a bulgarian shisk kebab.

you think?

cam