This is the first time I've traveled alone in fourteen years. I was pretty nervous about going, but spacialk was incredibly kind and bought me a ticket, and there's no way I'd turn down that generosity. So off to Philadelphia I went for a long weekend trip!

Friday

After waking up an hour before my alarm due to more nightmares, I ate the lunch I didn't eat on Thursday due to meeting stemi_equivalent for lunch on short notice--she was in town for a toxicology conference--I hurriedly showered, finished packing, and then called a Lyft because I was nervous about my original bus ➡️ L plan. I arrived in plenty of time and needn't have worried, plus I had to listen to an extremely uncomfortable radio show where someone called in saying he had been ghosted but thought they had good chemistry, so they called the woman he went on a date with. Her reason turned out to be astrological incompatibility, so the two of them got into a shouting match on the air. I probably should have just asked the driver to change the station.

I got through security with no trouble at all--the TSA agent checking my ID cheerfully said, "No mistaking you for anybody else!"--and actually managed to sleep on the flight, a minor miracle. At Philadelphia I was met by jmenda, who picked me up from the airport and, after chatting a bit, asked if I was hungry. I was, so we went to lunch in Chinatown at Terakawa Ramen because he was eager to get my opinion of their food. It was quite good:


That's chicken broth and chicken slices, but the presentation is exactly like the more usual pork ramen. The noodles were perfectly springy and the broth, usually the hardest part for American ramen restaurants, was good as well. I devoured it and then we went back to jmenda's condo. His wife bunekaislam was still at work, so he showed me some YouTube videos he enjoyed and then we attempted to watch Wonder Woman but were foiled by the proliferation of streaming services, so jmenda got some work done and I read.

After we had discussed religion and philosophy for a while, bunekaislam got home from work and we came upstairs. The three of us talked and I got to interact with this daughter as well, who at first seemed pretty shy of me but eventually took to me. Maybe. She kept giving me a copy of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and then taking it away before I had a chance to read any of it to her. bunekaislam opined that maybe because I spoke a little Japanese to her she was convinced I didn't know how to talk and was trying to teach me, but I don't know. I tried but I didn't get anywhere, and then the time came for dinner.

We took a Lyft to tweetjoshtweet's apartment. Damionw was already there, followed shortly by jdcohen and spacialk. It was so good to see them all again after three years away, and then we sat down to a Shabbat dinner of salmon, broccoli, challah, rice with apples, and quinoa.

And we talked about how we feel old and time was passing too fast, because all old friends do that when they meet up after a long time away.

Me: "But you all said that I hadn’t changed at all!"
jdcohen: "Yes, but we aren’t all Jewish warlocks like you!"
bunekaislam: "You need to teach them your juju[jewju]."

We talked more after dinner, with everyone but me saying it had been too long and they should meet up for dinner more often since they all lived within a couple miles of each other, and then tweetjoshtweet suggested board games, so he broke out Magic Maze.


It's a simultaneous, real-time board game, which took some time to explain. The four pieces need to steal gear from the magic mall and make it to the exit before time runs out, and each player can move any of the four pieces in one particular direction, so players hav to cooperate without speaking to make it to each equipment piece and then to the exit. The first time we won pretty handily, and the second time tweetjoshtweet introduced additional rules, adding a separate exit for each piece and rotating which allowed direction each player could move pieces by one to the left every time the timer was paused. We barely failed the first time, but came back the second time and won thanks to my cunning plan. I mean, we might have won anyway, but we followed my plan and won, so I'll take credit for it.

I was expecting it to be more chaotic than it was. When I heard "simultaneous, real-time," I figured that Magic Maze would be a nightmare of everyone constantly reaching in and moving things around. But each player can only accomplish one, maybe two, tasks, which made it much easier to keep track of. The gameplay came in trying to arrange things so the player who could move north, or explore new rooms, would notice when their abilities were required.

We stayed around and chatted a bit more, but it was late and jmenda and bunekaislam were turning into pumpkins, and that started a chain of events that led to everyone leaving. We agreed to meet up for brunch in the morning and retired to our separate homes, where we all (presumably) went to sleep. bunekaislam offered me some melatonin in the hope that it would help with my nightmares, and soon after taking it I went to sleep.

Saturday

I woke up exhausted and groggy on Saturday despite going to bed earlier than normal. Maybe the melatonin was a bad idea.

We had made plans to go to brunch, so we (except tweetjoshtweet, since it’s Shabbat) left early and walked through light rain to Honey’s Sit 'n Eat. While we were waiting for everyone to show up, I was conscripted into reading:


I didn’t actually do much reading, because she kept grabbing the book back from me as soon as I started. After we ordered and ate, though, I got my chance to read the whole thing.

I ordered the Bubby’s Brisket Breakfast, brisket, two eggs, latkes, and biscuits, which was delicious but meant that I wasn’t hungry until dinner. We didn’t stay too long because the restaurant was really crowded and they were clearly trying to keep people moving, and when we all split up with promises to recombine at dinner, I went off with spacialk and Damionw. The two of them were going to look at a possible investment property and with their permission I tagged along for the ride.

The property they looked at was like an Escher house, with four separate units that all twisted in and around each other. Two of them were connected by a long hallway and there were some low ceilings mixed weirdly with high ceilings, low doorways, and stairs I had to duck almost double while climbing. It was almost like multiple houses had been squashed together onto the same plot of land. None of that compared to what was down in the basement, though:


It seemed like it used to be a club or speakeasy, since there were separate male and female bathrooms, that stage, what looked like a coat closet, and a small kitchen [Damionw's later research indicated that it used to be a church]. Of course, now it’s hideously mold-damaged and would take extensive and expensive work to get into useable condition again, so seeing that changed the calculus of whether they want to put in a bid on the property. We said goodbye to the realtor and went back to spacialk and Damionw’s house, where I drank some tea and was falling asleep where I sat, so spacialk asked me if I wanted to take a nap. I never take naps, but I was so exhausted that I said yes and collapsed on the spare bed when she showed me to the guest room

An hour later, they woke me up because it was time to go to the Sausage Party--a party held by one of their friends dedicated to eating sausage. I was a bit worried about going to a party where I didn’t know anyone, but I turned out that wasn’t true. scottjohnsonhatboro was there too, and we spent a bit of time talking about comics and Witcher III while the hosts threw some chicken sausage on the grill to accommodate my dietary restrictions. It was delicious.

One person there also asked me if she could run her fingers through my hair. Since she asked, I didn't have a problem with it. Sometimes people don't ask, and that's awful. But I'm fine with it if people are polite.

At 7 p.m., we said our goodbyes and drove to Marrakesh, a Moroccan restaurant that we went to right before graduation back at Penn and whose other branch of which I went to the last time I was in D.C. We got there first, joined shortly afterward by jdcohen, with jmenda and bunekaislam arriving close behind, and after a short wait out in the cold, we were seated in the opulent inside, with pillows all over the benches, low tables, and curtains everywhere. Quite a contrast to the alleyway outside, though there's a painted wooden sign now so it doesn't look like people are just standing around in an alley while they wait to be seated.

They have a set menu, six courses, salad and pastry chicken and non-pastry chicken and lamb and couscous and fruit, with mint tea and baklava as dessert. Here's the non-pastry chicken before we all dug in:


While I was eating, bunekaislam offered me a hint of how to eat with your hands--hold your hand palm up, with the food on your four fingers, and then use your thumb to push it into your mouth while your fingers prevent it from spilling. This sounds a lot easier than I, someone with basically no practice eating food with my hands, found it, but I managed a couple attempts. And it certainly makes more sense than trying to stuff all five fingers and food into my mouth.

At one point, the music suddenly changed and got much louder and more aggressive, to the point where it startled me. It sounded like a video game where an enemy was nearby and the combat music had suddenly engaged, but it turned out to be a belly dancer who used it as her performance piece. But she did come out carrying a sword, so I guess it was combat music after all.

Everyone else generously paid for my meal. They've been so kind to me this whole trip.

After dinner we split up again. I spent a bit of time talking with jmenda in his basement / home theatre center and watching short clips of some TV before the sleepiness caught up with me, and I said goodnight to him and went upstairs to go to bed. This time, I didn't take any melatonin.

Sunday

And because of the melatonin the previous day and because there was nothing I needed to be up for the next morning, I slept in until 10:30 a.m. By the time I woke up, jmenda and bunekaislam had been up for a while and it was almost lunch, so while we waited for their live-in nanny (who they call খালা khala, “[mother's side] aunt,“ in Bengali) to finish her shower and then went out to Nam Phuong for phở. Or at least, they did--I decided I wanted coconut beef and broccoli instead, since anything with coconut in it is extra delicious. While there, they asked me a bit about my time in Japan and about the Japanese attitude toward c.f. women in the workplace, which I was happen to answer to the best of my ability. They treated me to lunch, which I only realized on the way out when we didn't stop and pay at the register.

On the way back, bunekaislam complimented me on how when jmenda deliberately drifted a bit when taking turns that I didn't even change the tone of my sentence.

After lunch they had some errands to run, though the first thing we did was stop in at a Lebanese restaurant called Manakeesh for delicious walnut and cashew baklava. While jmenda and bunekaislam went up to the halal butcher, I went down the street and took a picture of Abyssinia, the Ethiopian restaurant that we went to so many times while we were all students at Penn.


After we went back to their condo, bunekaislam said that she was going to help their nanny with a recipe that she hasn't made in several years, and so jmenda suggested that the two of us watch a movie. His initial offerings were Interstellar, Wonder Woman, and Deadpool, and when I asked him which one we should watch given that we only had time for one movie, he picked Deadpool.

It was good! The kind of humor in the movie is usually a turn-off for me, so I was kind of surprised that I actually liked it at all. I think a lot of my taste for it was that it wasn't a tragedy. Even though it was clearly a comedy, I kept expecting the love interest to die, or to reject Deadpool in the end, and neither of those happened.

My favorite character was definitely Negasonic Teenage Warhead, though. Exactly the kind of person I would be if I had mutant powers.

As I was listening to the rain, jmenda came down with his daughter and said he was going for a walk in the rain. Rather than sit inside, I came along with him, and then his daughter reached for my hand after taking his. We walked through the puddles and the rain and chatted while his daughter splashed around, and she eventually ran off the path and stood alone under a tree for ten minutes. I only wish I knew what she was thinking.


When we got back, bunekaislam was napping, so jmenda and I sat around until dinner time. It was just the two of us along with spacialk and Damionw, and at their suggestion we went to a Korean barbecue restaurant called Kim's BBQ. I've eaten a lot of Korean BBQ, but always in the Japanese yakiniku version, never the actual Korean cuisine, so it was pretty much entirely new to me. It was much spicier than yakiniku, with dozens of small dishes that came beforehand, most of which were spicy. We got a bunch of meat--probably too much, honestly--along with some spicy rice cakes and spicy noodles and ate a ton of food while we talked. Then I said goodbye to spacialk and Damionw, who have to work tomorrow, and jmenda and I went home.

bunekaislam was awake but tired, so we all went to bed pretty soon afterwards. Not so soon that their daughter didn't want me to read to her more, though. This time she brought me a copy of Rocket Science for Babies, and plopped it in my hands with maybe the cutest words she's said all weekend:

Rocket baby!

I read it to her a few times until she got distracted by the cat, and then it was her, and our, bedtime.

Monday

Despite going to bed at 10:30 I still slept in until 7:30, and when I went downstairs bunekaislam had already gone to work and jmenda wasn't on the ground floor. I read near the front door for a while until their daughter noticed that I was awake. As soon as she did, she wanted me to read to her. She'd keep getting distracted in the way that toddlers do, fiddling with some bowls on the coffee table or trying to pull the umbrellas out of the umbrella stand, and once trying to pull down a heavy horse-head bookend before I stopped her. She kept looking out the window and wandering around, and while originally I thought she was saying "doggy" and that she had seen someone walking their dog outside, eventually I realized that she was saying "daddy" and looking for jmenda.

I did get to briefly bond with the nanny, too. She doesn't speak English and I don't speak Bengali, but she heard their daughter reciting the numbers after me while I read Night-night, Little Pookie and gave me a big grin over it.

After forty-five minutes or so jmenda came upstairs from the basement and asked if I wanted breakfast. I did.


That's beef bacon, not pork. It was good and crispy. And the mug in the upper left is special--it changes colors to reveal the picture when hot liquids are poured into it, and the picture itself was taken by bunekaislam's mother from a hot-air balloon.

After breakfast jmenda had some work he had to do, so I tagged along to the rotunda in the building out in front of their condo complex to study Japanese. After jmenda shut off the machine making a high-pitched whining sound it was quite pleasant, though we left shortly after someone else showed up and started talking loudly on her phone. I got a lot of blog posts from シカゴの夏は短すぎ finished, though!

My Japanese tutor has kept suggesting that I go to Zahav, an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia. I suggested that to people and I heard that it wasn't going to happen since it takes months to get a reservation, but there were some other restaurants owned by the people behind Zahav that would be a lot easier to go to. jmenda suggested one of those, Dizengoff, for lunch, so we walked there in the light rain and talked about everything that's been going on with me. It was a good walk, about a mile, and waiting for us at the end were hummus, chicken, and walnut bowls. Delicious. I was dubious of a hummus-based meal when I heard about it, but it was delicious! Chicken and walnut bits over top of a bunch of hummus, with thick pita on the side. It makes me wonder if I can somehow find a way to replicate it at home. I think getting the hummus right would be hardest part.

On the way back, I took a picture of Rittenhouse Square in the rain.


When we got back his daughter was asleep and there was only about an hour before I had to head to the airport, so we just sat in the basement for a while and listened to music. His daughter didn't want to give me a hug goodbye when I was leaving, but I understand. I'd be shy too around someone new who was five times my size.

I got to the airport and through security without much trouble and went to the gate, where there was a flight to Phoenix waiting to board. And then then problems started. They boarded about the time I was supposed to board. Our plane arrived fifteen minutes after we were supposed to leave. And then when we did finally make it on the plane and pull out of the gate, we sat on the tarmac for forty-five minutes before we finally took off.

We left, two and a half hours late.

We arrived, two and a half hours late.

Once I landed there were no further problems, and while the Lyft driver on the way home took a weird interest in the prostitution scene in Japan (), I got home without any trouble, did some minimal cleaning and put the dishes away, and went straight to bed.

The next morning, I made miso soup for breakfast on a weekday for the first time in months.

This was such an amazing trip! I'm so glad that everyone was able to come together and make it happen, and I'm so grateful for their kind hospitality. I really needed this trip and even though I'm not at work, grinding away at thousands of records that the new database jut passed over for some reason, I feel a lot more relaxed.

What a lovely way to spend a weekend.