rodzik@www

This past Saturday night at midnight I finally turned 21. All I can say is it's about time. The artificial age barriers and age discrimination that exists is ridiculous. I mean I'd really like to see legitimate justification for why someone can vote for the leader of the free world and why that person can die defending this country, but they can't drink a beer. Sure, it's a cliche question, but has it ever been satisfactorily answered?

Right, so anyway, now that I'm able to actually go into bars a couple of my co-workers invited me out to a bar with them. I'm going to disqualify the bars from Saturday night from my record, so with that done this was my first "real" trip to a bar. At the same time, despite living just outside of DC it was my first time using the DC metro and really my first time in DC not as a tourist (seeing as I'm seriously considering living here full-time, I'm starting to consider myself at least somewhat of a "local").

So I get back from work at around 6 PM last night, look up where I'm going and how to get there, check email and take care of some other business and then head out at around 6:45. I grab the metro at around 7 PM and we head into downtown. About halfway there I switched trains and I must've gotten to the other line's platform right after a train left, because it was a fairly long wait for the next train. A few stops later and our train was literally so full you couldn't move (fortunately I had a seat) and nobody could get on. Unfortunately one of the cars was so full that the doors couldn't close, and instead of the extra person or two getting off the metro they decided to delay our train by 15 minutes while security a) figured out what was happening, b) figured out what to do about it, and then c) fixed the problem. So after that delay we finally got to my stop at around 7:45 PM.

I head up the longest escalator I've ever seen in my life (ok, it's probably comparable to the one out of the train at Hartsfield) and find myself on the wrong side of Dupont Circle. I had a vague idea of where Buffalo Billiards was so I started walking. Long story short I got lost and didn't find the bar until about 8:15 PM. I met up with one of the guys and it turns out he had been told the wrong bar (and then relayed it to me), so we ended up walking a bit and arriving at Brickskeller where everyone else was. A quick note about Buffalo Billiards: this was a rather large bar. They had a ton of pool tables (imagine that) as well as shuffleboard and darts and it seemed like a fairly popular place, so I'll definitely be trying to make it back there sometime this summer.

Brickskeller is a bar with the tagline of "The world of beer." While some places might use it as a gimmick, these guys meant it. They literally had a magazine of beer choices, and not wanting to waste this opportunity by ordering something that would probably get my hand chopped off (Bud Light?) I decided to give Grolsch Light Ale a shot. I'm not even going to try to rate or compare the beer at this point, as I don't have much of a variety of reference points...maybe some other time. A while later after finishing that off I figured I'd try something completely random, so I asked our waitress which of the Polish beers she recommended and she picked out the Okocim O.K. beer. Similar to the Grolsch Light Ale it's a light beer, which was good news for me because I'm not really a fan of dark beers.

It was nice to finally be able to extend my social life into the one realm that was still off-limits. Taking a risk and trying two completely new things was also a great experience, and I'm glad I did it and plan on continuing to see what else there is that I like (and at some point, of course, what I don't). I've done a lot with the group of interns from work but it was great to socialize with some of the full-time guys in my office as well in an environment outside of work as well.

Overall it was a great night, but the transit time made it a bit rough getting out of bed this morning, as I was already not getting quite enough sleep before and then getting at midnight last night didn't help much, but it wasn't a huge inconvenience. Work from about 7:30 - 8:30 this morning was a bit rough but I didn't even notice the time go by after that and eventually I was stunned to look at the clock to see it was 5:45 PM and that I should probably go home.

I've been really slacking on updating this thing in the last 7 months...there's some big stuff I never got around to posting and some things coming up I want to write about, so here's to hoping I actually end up posting it.