Tokyo or Bust

Even when it's not Saturday night and the mariachi bands aren't aye-yay-yay-yaying in full swing, Puerto Alegre is noisy as all get-out. So is Lower-Haight beer*-swilling utopia Toronado. I think Chris decided to split his bon voyage party between the two places so he could show off his "teacher's voice." (It's booming.)

Chris, who earned his TESOL MA at SFSU (where I'm slogging through the English Literature MA program), has been teaching English as a second language at the Academy of Art for what seems like a really long time now, but he's leaving Thursday for Tokyo, where he'll teach 10 1.5 hour classes each week to students at a private university. He's got a one-year contract, a subsidized studio apartment, and a mile-long line of friends waiting to stay with him once he gets settled. Sounds good to me!

While Chris preps for Japan, I'm prepping for my visit to the French consulate tomorrow afternoon. It'll be the first big powwow (is "powwow" totally un-PC? And do I care if it is?) with the men and women who will, ultimately, decide whether my future includes another stint in Europe. I'm so exhausted from all the paperwork that I don't even care whether they accept my proposal or not.**

* After some sleuthing, I discovered that there is some truth to the Duvel/right-wing conspiracy theory; turns out that a Duvel logo found its way onto an anti-immigration flyer put out by racist Belgian political party Vlaams Belang, but this rebuttal (en francais) by the Duvel peeps denies support of VB, saying, essentially, that it's a harmful rumor and that they don't align themselves with any political party. Hmmm ...

** it's probably just the exhaustion speaking. But maybe not.

The Girl From Ipanema Empanada Enchilada

We went to an event in the Mission on Monday night, and, as usual, left the house late and thus didn't have time to grab a burrito beforehand. We arrived at the venue just in time, grabbed a couple of chairs, then a couple of beers (didn't some famous literary type once say "beer is food"? Um, no.), and settled in for the entertainment portion of the evening.

The MC got up on stage and announced that the Girl From Empanada was in the house, and I couldn't help but love her for her clever name, but fell even deeper in love when I overheard her saying she had homemade vegan empanadas in addition to all the non-veg varieties. Stoked. We got two for a tenner, and they were delicious. It was too dark to see what was going on inside, but I tasted olives and raisins and other non-meaty things. Yum.

I had singer/animal advocate Astrud Gilberto's "The Girl from Ipanema" stuck in my head last night as I prepped dinner for our guests, Scott and Jenn. Enchiladas were on the menu again, so the song morphed into "The Girl from Enchilada." We didn't do an exact replica of our last dinner-party meal; this time we had fried plantains, black beans, and homemade vegan sour cream to accompany the main course. I'm still full. We won't be having enchiladas again for a long, long time.

All that food and drink activated our chatting mechanisms to the nth degree. Conversation zoomed from Scott and Jenn's recent trip to "Uncle Gary's" pad in Nevada City to Jenn's upcoming trip to Ireland, then careened over to eviction notices and alternate modes of housing, before zipping over to the FIFA World Cup games in South Africa and the recent opening of S & J's friends' new beer joint near Encuentro and Souley Vegan in Oakland's Jack London Square. This was about the time Scott shattered my world with the news that the family behind that finest of Belgian exports, Duvel (aka my favorite beer), are militant right-wingers who oppose nearly everything I hold dear. I'll have to investigate that; I'm just not ready to bid Duvel adieu quite yet.

Before saying nightnight to Scott and Jenn, we were able to fob off a few no-longer-needed-because-we're-moving items, including books and some ancient cassette tapes. There's lots more where that came from, so if you need anything (books, shoes, purses, plants, sunglasses, that sort of thing), holler.