We left around 4:00pm in order to get to the restaurant in DC in time; our reservation was for 5:30. The timing worked out perfectly, given that we had to drive 40 minutes to the nearest Metro station and then Metro into town. We ate at Jaleo, which is a really good restaurant. I’m going to bore you by listing the things we had for dinner.
Manzanas con Manchego Pasamontés: Apple and ‘Pasamontés Manchego’ cheese salad with walnuts
Datiles con tocino como hace todo el mundo: Traditional fritters of dates and bacon
Pollo al ajillo con salsa verde: Grilled chicken with green sauce and garlic sauce
Escalivada Catalana: Roasted pepper, eggplant and sweet onion with olive oil and sherry vinegar
For dessert Lea had Arroz con leche “Tia Chita”: Espuma milk rice pudding with lemon marmalade, and I had Pastel Vasco con helado de leche merengada: Basque cake with semolina cream, cinnamon-vanilla sauce and ice milk.
Everything was really good, but the desserts tasted a little off to me. The ice milk with my dessert had a weird aftertaste that it took me a while to identify. To me, it tasted exactly like some sort of hand soap. Lea’s dessert tasted the same, in the milk part. I have no idea if it’s some weird spice that I’m not familiar with that might have caused it, or what. I seriously doubt that Jaleo was serving two different desserts contaminated with hand soap. Anyway, it was odd. If anyone who reads this has any idea what it might have been, please leave me a comment!
After dinner we had a little time to kill so we spent half an hour in a nearby bookstore before walking to the theater. The theater itself is amazing. It’s brand-new and beautiful and really nice. We had incredible seats - fourth row from the stage right in the middle, so we could see and hear everything. I don’t know much about Christopher Marlowe and hadn’t realized that Edward II was by him, so it was interesting to read the program and learn all of that. The play was really marvelous, although very dark and sad. A king has a homosexual love affair with a commoner and it pulls his kingdom apart, essentially. The language was incredible and now I have to get myself a book of Marlowe’s plays so I can read them. I really like going to plays. I need to do it more often. Tonight was the second play we’d seen this year and it’s so worth the money.
At intermission we got a horrible fit of giggles, first because the actors all seemed to spit across the stage whenever they were really expressing their lines. We were so close to the stage that we could the saliva flying. Maybe that’s just a characteristic of actors projecting their voices. The second reason we had a fit of giggles is, as we were taking a walk during intermission, we passed a man in a group of people who, um, flatulated really loudly. Unmistakably loudly. It was hard to control Pumpkin, but I managed it. The perils of going out into public, lemme tell ya.
The trek home was fine, although I had to stop to gas up the Jeep on the way. It cost me $55.72 to fill up! Ugh! Now we’re home. Lea crashed right away, but I’ve got my second wind so here I am typing this up and considering what to put on my alphabetical cd mix. I signed up with one of VUBOQ’s friends to make a mix CD with 26 songs, A through Z.
La la la.
