I spent most of today recovering from last night’s night out on the town. My friend and former co-worker from my college days, Neil, was in town for a week of training at Red Hat corporate headquarters.We started the evening off by visiting Neomonde, a Middle-Eastern eatery on Beryl street in Raleigh, North Carolina.
We then headed downtown for drinks. Originally, I thought that we might head to Tir-Na-Nog on Blount Street, but as we were driving back into the downtown area we passed a bar that I’ve wanted to go to for quite awhile — the Flying Saucer. I started out with a local brew called White Wolf Golden and we began chatting. Eventually, Neil called one of his colleagues who was also in town for training, Steve. Steve joined us shortly. It was kind of odd, they seemed to have worked together for awhile, but never actually met since both worked remotely. Neil worked from Colorado, while Steve worked from Massachusetts. This was a good opportunity to ask a lot of questions about life and culture in the Mountain West and the Northeast. I’ve never been to these parts of the country I’ve never visited, but felt these areas had a lot more in common with my personal and political views than the more authoritarian areas of North Carolina or the religiously conservative areas of the Midwest where I used to live.
I had a number of beers throughout the evening, but I knew that I was in trouble as soon as Neil opened up with a few rounds of shots. I wasn’t really down with the technical aspects of shots since I get confused with things pretty easily — you know, dropping a shot glass into a bigger glass and chugging. Shots soon led to darts. This seemed really dangerous, but I was too far gone to care.
There were a lot of high points during the evening. One of the crazy moments, though, was when Neil got the idea to call our old boss in Indiana. It was about 1pm and the fine folks at the Flying Saucer wanted us to leave. But we decided to do some drunk dialing anyway. Oddly enough, our boss picked up and talked for awhile. Neil and I decided that we’ll call him every time we get together at one of these bar outings.
I didn’t pass up the opportunity to take a few snapshots of the waitresses. Anyone who would so graciously put up with my drunken antics would definitely classify as a saint.
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