But alas, here I am with a house in not only Oregon, but my hometown of Springfield, Oregon (The Simpsons Springfield I swear). Accurately described by locals as Springtucky, as in it's a small town that wouldn't be out of place in Kentucky.
So, a month ago we started the long ass trip to the other side of the world.
We started with a stop in Portland, Oregon for 3 days. We chose to stay in Portland for a few days for 2 reasons:
1. We needed to get over our jetlag and figured it would be easier if we were somewhere that didn't require moving in to ie. our new house.
2. It was our 1 year anniversary that weekend and let's face it there just really aren't any nice restaurants in Eugene/Springfield, but Portland has 1, yes 1 fancy restaurant =)
We spent our time in Portland wandering around downtown in a bit of a daze striving to fight through the 17 hour time difference that our bodies were reminding us of and enjoying the last few days of summer and sunshine (in the northern hemisphere anyway, luckily we get to return back to the southern hemisphere where spring is just beginning!)
We encountered a fair amount of freaks that I must say I was shocked by. I know I didn't live in Portland for very long, but this was definitely not the Portland I remembered. Lo and behold there was an anime convention going on that weekend, called Kumoricon and all the fruitcakes we'd encountered we're just dressing up like their favorite anime character...as one does when one is into such things.
Anyway, aside from the weird anime..ers or kumoriconers? we have a lovely anniversary weekend. We stayed at The Nines Hotel, which if Dom will let me I will totally be copying when I start decorating either the San Francisco house or the Oregon house. We made it through the jetlag, had our anniversary dinner at Portland's fanciest restaurant, Portland City Grill, which has a lovely view of the city from the 37th floor, and if you're ever in Portland and go to this restaurant, have the steak. I had salmon, which was absolutely delicious, but Dom's filet mignon was hands down the most amazing thing on that menu.
Sidenote about our anniversary dinner. I made a reservation at this restaurant at least a month ago. It was for 8pm on Sunday, September 5, which was the day before labor day, so it was a fairly busy night for the restaurant. We show up maybe 5 minutes early and while we're waiting for the hostess to finish up with the couple in front of us we hear her tell someone else on the staff that they're running right on time, NOT behind schedule. Then it's our turn and instead of seating us she tells us they're running a bit behind and would we mind having a drink at the bar. EVEN THOUGH SHE JUST SAID THEY WERE RUNNING ON SCHEDULE. Since it's our anniversary and we're in a good mood, the bar is beautiful and there's an awesome piano player that will play any song you want at the bar we decide not to point this out to her and just go with it. She hands us one of those lighted buzzer things and we go find a seat at the bar. About half an hour later still nothing from our buzzer and at this point we're getting a little annoyed, so Dom jokingly says "maybe our buzzer is broken, I'll go check" and he goes to the hostess to check on our reservation. Guess what? OUR BUZZER WAS BROKEN. No joke.
So, we asked her why she didn't ask around the bar for us, she did after all tell us to go to the bar, so it would be fair to assume on her part that we didn't just up and leave...also keeping in mind that the hostess station is right next to the bar and the bar really isn't that big. She tells us she DID ask around the bar but no one responded.
Let's all roll our eyes in unison.
Because it was our anniversary dinner, we didn't want to get our knickers in a twist so early in the evening, we quietly gave her our best WTF, you're an idiot look and followed her to our seats. Now, since the restaurant is up on the 37th floor and it overlooks the water and the city, there are a few coveted seats around the windows. As she showed us to our table, which was not a window table, we noticed an empty window table right next to where she was seating us. So, we asked her if we could have the window table, since she had left us cooling our heels at the bar unnecessarily after all, surely she should try to compensate by giving us the good table. She spouted off some ridiculousness about how there was a special waiting list for the window and if we wanted a window we should have told her when we arrived. At this point Dom got pissed and asked to speak to her manager. As she walked away we quietly giggled to ourselves, because we weren't honestly that upset and our evening was far from being ruined, but at this point we needed some compensation for the terrible hostess. Anyway to make my already long story short...that's an oxymoron....shorter than it could be. The manager came by and let us have a window table, where we discovered that our original table was actually a better table. =) Haha. Nevertheless we enjoyed the sheepish look on the managers face when we told him that our anniversary dinner was being ruined by his incompetent hostess and relished in the fact that as far as he was concerned the window table was the better table and he had to squeeze us into the stupid "window table list".
The next morning after our fabulous anniversary dinner (it really was damn tasty, and I still recommend going to the Portland City Grill and having the steak, even after our seating debacle) we headed off to catch our train down to good ole Springtucky. Which will come in my next post and I'll show you some piccies of the house.
No comments:
Post a Comment