Social Larva

I hesitate to call myself a "social butterfly," though I have had lunch out with friends two days in a row now.  Let's just go with the less pretentious "Social Larva," though I have no expectation that this gay, mad social whirl is going to continue beyond today.

Yesterday I went to my now-monthly lunch at the Great Wall Chinese buffet.  Ruth and I used to get together every other week, but we decided to make it monthly now--and even this lunch had to be rescheduled 2 times before we could find a date that worked for both of us.

Over our usual fare from the extensive buffet (mine heavy on noodles and meat, hers on rice and veggies), we got caught up on our lives since our last meeting.   Some difficulties with meetings she's been in lately gave me a great opportunity to lecture on my juice and crackers philosophy of life again.  I love doing that.  We finished our lunch with jello and fruit and promises to get together again next month.

I seem to be doing a bunch of post card swaps lately and have one coming up for which I was looking for a specific type of post card, so I stopped by our local World Market to see what they had (since my last visit there, many months ago they have remodeled the store and I didn't find any postcards at all).  

As I was leaving the store, I ran into another friend, Ann, whom I see every year or so somewhere in town.  We always promise to get together "some time" to have lunch and somehow we never do.  

But this time we both had our calendars with us and decided to set a date.  Turned out she had nothing on her calendar today, nor did I, so I went out for my second lunch this week.  We decided to eat at Ket Mo Ree, one of the newer Thai places in town.  We have so many Thai places now that I swear whenever you ask where another person wants to eat lunch 9 times out of 10 they suggest a Thai place.

Ket Mo Ree may be one of the prettier restaurants in town.  It took over space that used to be occupied by Strelitzia florest and it has tall ceilings, huge paper lanterns.  It has a beautiful wooden bar, nice wooden tables, and big windows that look out onto the street.  I don't know what the name means.  I thought maybe it was the name of the god in the window, but I can't find any reference to that on the internet (and of course if it's not on the internet, it doesn't exist).

The waitress seated us, poured our water, handed us the big leatherette bound menu and explained about the lunch specials, and disappeared.  There were maybe four other tables occupied, since we arrived early.

We quickly made our choices and started getting caught up on each other's lives -- who was married to whom, whose kid had children, which mutual friends had died, where our kids were working, where we had traveled lately, what we are doing in our retirement.  You know.  The usual things you discuss when you haven't been together for many years.

Ann kept looking around the room for our waitress, who was nowhere to be seen.  We waited a very. long. time before she finally arrived to take our order.

I ordered pad thai, because I always order pad thai and Ann ordered one of the curry dishes.  The food arrived in a reasonable amount of time, obviously cooked to order, since it was boiling hot.  It looked beautiful.

But I noticed right away that there were no peanuts on the plate.  Now, to me the whole reason you order pad thai is for the chopped peanuts...and any restaurant that has a generous amount of peanuts on their dish gets double stars from me.

This had NO. Peanuts.  It also was missing a certain "something" I can't put my finger on.  The shrimp were slightly off--not bad, but I like shrimp and I didn't like these.  If I had ordered "tofu pad thai" I would have been in 7th heaven since it had an overabundance of tofu.   You actually had to dig through the tofu to find the noodles.

All in all, I was disappointed.  The restaurant where Walt and I usually have thai food, Thai Nakorn, is one that I really love.  I don't think I will try straying again to some other thai restaurant, especially not Ket Mo Ree.

But the lunch itself, apart from the food, was a lot of fun and we have promised not to let such a long time elapse before we do it again.

Ann and her husband are getting ready to take their first Viking cruise, from St. Petersburg to Moscow, so I had lots of advice to give her and have sent her a link to my diary of our trip to Russia.  I hope it helps give her a flavor of what they are about to experience.  I raved about the trip highly, so I'm sure that it helped make her feel better about it all.

Tomorrow will be a strange day -- nobody to have lunch with!