Portland and Happy Hour

Current Mood: Dynamic
Music Playing:Thrice, The Alchemy Index Vols 1-2


Think of your idyllic happy hour; probably includes something like $2 beers, $3 glasses of wine and maybe $4 highball drinks and an abbreviated appetizer menu. You love going not for the food, but for the opportunity to get a good buzz on after a long day of work for half the cost. Well, when I do happy hour, I’m more concerned about the food menu; don’t get me wrong, cheap drinks are great, but cheap food is equally great. While visiting a friend in Portland Oregon last weekend, I was told we were going to happy hour at a place along NW 23rd street called Uptown Billiards Club. It didn’t exactly sound like your typical happy hour venue, but I thought maybe we’d get discounted fares for playing a few rounds of pool. As it turned out, this place is one of Portland’s best-kept secrets. Available Tuesday through Saturday from 4 to 7 pm, this place does the best happy hour you could ever imagine: five-course meal with wine pairing for $20… I’ve rendered myself speechless just thinking about it again… yes you heard correctly, five courses, with wine, $20; and if you don’t want the wine, just the food, $10 (if you could see your face right now, it would look something like this emoticon :0



The menu changes every other week and is always themed regionally; this week’s menu was Cuban. Let me back track a little bit and give you the run down on this place. It is on the second level of a building right in the heart of the best shopping street in Portland, NW 23rd. When you ascend the stairs you’re immediately transported back in time; some toe tapping jazz plays and you feel as if you might be underdressed for this upscale yet slightly causal, speakeasy-looking bar. There are actually more pool tables and seats at the bar then tables for eating, and the first question the waitress asked was whether we wanted an eight or nine foot table (we weren’t sure if it really mattered since we were here for the food, but managed to a table, though I believe it was only about six feet long) The wall to the left of us was a painted bookcase and there was a cloth curtain to the right of our table covering a neighboring pool table room (probably where the high rolling gangster types would hang out) and an armoire with a large mirror on it was at the far wall (probably for storing the large overcoats and weaponry).



Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the food… first course was red beans and rice with pork, very traditional urban Cuban food, the flavor was great, spiced well with a slight hint of heat, unfortunately the beans were a bit on the crunchy side (at first I started to realize why the food was only $10). But then I was pleasantly surprised by the 2nd course a chilled lentil salad with celery, carrot and onion tossed with a smoky vinaigrette (it was delicious) The wines for the first two courses were incredible; the bar itself is actually well known for their wine list covering wines from California, Oregon and Washington as well as France, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Australia. I will probably have to go back and edit this blog after posting, but I believe the first course was paired with a Sangiovese from Washington of all places and the lentil salad was paired with a Grenache blend from Australia. Third course was a creamy garlic and onion soup garnished with cilantro (yum!) Don’t remember what it was paired with, a blend of some sort. Fourth course was what they called a mojito chicken sandwich; chicken marinated in a mojito served on a baguette with simple tomato and lettuce accompaniment (this was also quite tasty and paired with another blend…I wish they would update their website so I would have all the correct information). Last course was dessert, a spiced rice pudding with some sort of candied citrus; I think the people that I was with was rather turned off by the consistency of the pudding, but it was delicious and the wine pairing was something I couldn’t figure out, there were a bunch of words on the menu I had never seen before, but it seemed to me, to be some sort of rose dessert wine (I was the only one that enjoyed this as well).
All in all we left, fully satisfied, and with money to spend on drinks for later. There really should be more places everywhere that do a happy hour like this…
And just as a side note, there are a lot of great happy hour places in Portland, nothing quite like this place, but still super good, and super cheap! Discover them!

Thoughts while people watching in the airport

Current Mood: Enthralled
Music Playing: Timbaland, Shock Value








Rapid Travel


Carrying four by four samsonites
past overflowing food courts
filled with over anxious over-bites;
the clock moves tediously
stirring impatient travelers
ever so effortlessly.
The PA system teases
causing restless moody bodies to gather
and do whatever pleases.
Like lost sheep
following mirages
in desperate need of sleep,
a narrow passage leads the way
to seats like a cheap motel double bed
and it’s the only place to stay.
Upon ascending,
thirty four thousand feet up,
you breath in recycled air.
Clouds extend like a silk gown
with a peach lain embroidery
never seen from the ground.
When the light gets low
a dotted universal metropolis
becomes the scene below…

Then to a screeching halt-
they hit the ground running,
speed stepping on sliding runways
meant for tired legs,
towing traveled laundry,
towards different places at the same time.

Where does love go?

Current Mood: Contemplative
Music Playing: John Mayer, Room For Squares

Strangely, after saying my final goodbye just a few days ago, I came home to an episode of Sex And The City, where Carrie was wondering why it’s so hard to stay friends with ex’s that you were in love with, and so she asked the question, “When people fall in love, and then they break up, where does the love go?” This question could quite possibly be one of the great wonders of the world…
When you fall in love, no matter how many times you’ve done it before, you always have the expectation that this new love could be your last, and when it turns out not to be, you are trampled yet again underneath the unforgiving foot of the love god’s. Often time’s love disappears even before the break-up. Often, people’s daily lives full of stress and routine affect the depth of love, and how you deal with these changes directly affects where the love will go. The stress of life can take a toll on any good relationship, we get so wrapped up in ourselves, that we forget and neglect the one thing we love the most, our partner. Frustration mounts because things aren’t like they used to be anymore and each party blames and accuses the other for the deterioration of love. Before you know it, love becomes a mixture of negative habits that tend to overshadow the positives in your relationship. The one thing that often leads to a failed relationship is communication; all other things can be perfect, but if a couple is not capable of communicating their frustrations during this period of stress and blame, then there is no solution, there is only an end. It’s no surprise that the more a couple struggles with their daily routine, the more they push away their partner, which inevitably leads to a break up. One thing all couples need to realize is the importance of addressing an issue like this, because the love is still there, you just don’t know how to weed out all the other crap to find it again. You have to be willing to say, “I’m frustrated” or, “I’m not happy,” because if you don’t do that, the relationship will without a doubt end. ALL couples go through rough patches, you just have to figure what to do to repair so you can re-energize.
When you are in a long-term committed relationship, break-ups don’t just happen with a snap of the fingers. Though we all wish it could be so easy, break-ups take awhile to go through, and it takes awhile to get over that love. Sometimes people find new love relatively quickly, and the new Mr. or Mrs. Right make it easier to forget about the emotional draining process of forgetting their ex, but in reality, they aren’t entirely over their previous love; it doesn’t take a new person to heal, in fact, it can turn out to be a very ruinous experiment. We need time for ourselves, and distracting ourselves with someone else does not heal wounds. We need to wrestle with our emotions before we can feel better again, before we can really accept new love. As cliché as it is, it has always been said that you need something like 3 months of healing for every year you were together, but somehow, people still find the ability to move on even before the thoughts of their past love are out of their head. Is the love really gone or are they just hiding from it because it feels better to be loved again, then not at all? After one month, one year, or one century, where does the love go? Someone once said that trying to forget someone you love is like trying to remember someone you never met. When you love someone, especially to the point of marriage or planning your life with them, when they go away, the love will forever remain a part of you. Is that to say that should they return to your life that you are capable of love with them again? Not necessarily, going back to Sex And The City, Carrie tries to make a “friend date” with Big, when Big has already moved on and is engaged to supermodel, Natasha. She finds that just being friends with him is difficult because there is already a “replacement” after her. It is in this moment when we see love return, it had been hidden somewhere inside, but when we realize that we have been replaced, we realize how much we still love our ex. When love re-emerges does it make us realize what we’ve lost and start to feel doubt and guilt about losing our ex? Possibly, but you can’t ask questions when your past love has already moved on.
Does love move onto the next partner? No, for each new partner, there is a different love; love is not one constant, never changing feeling; and so, though there is a new love, it is not the love you had before, that love is still inside of you, it has just been pushed further down to make room for new love. In the end, the person that is single ends up getting burned because they thought that their ex must have been going through the same turmoil as they had, but when there’s already someone new, everything becomes dishonest and hurtful.
They say that you need a full month or more of no communication to be fully over an ex, or to make you realize that you’ve made a huge mistake… But sometimes it doesn’t matter how much time is taken, healing takes a lot of work, and some people just handle it better then others; some find solace in friends, some in new love. Getting back to the question at hand, where does the love go? It comes and goes, it never leaves, but it also never stays, when you can stop hurting, stop questioning, stop hoping, the love can finally go into remission; now I say remission because as I said before, it never fully goes away, it’s much like a cancer that can come and go without warning; it can come on a song, in a smell, in a movie, and it always comes on anniversaries… But eventually with time, there are new songs and smells and movies that camouflage the others. Love wears many masks; it takes the form of hate and despair, of loneliness and envy, and in the end love becomes just a memory, all be it a very long memory...