thanksgiving (number 2)

The day after Thanksgiving:

I awoke early (because it is difficult to sleep soundly when there are ten-trillion people living in your one-bedroom apartment). My sister wanted to go to some stores, including Lowe's. Lowe's had a Christmas tree on sale for twenty dollars. So I thought it was festive to get a Christmas tree. Most people I know get Christmas tree's. I see nothing wrong with having a Christmas tree. Apparently it isn't normal here 'cause I was scoffed at last night when I went drinking with some friends. Apparently having a Christmas tree here isn't cool. Whatever. These people don't know how to do Christmas anyway. They need to work on the coolness of outdoor lights as it is.

After my excursion to Lowe's, the entire family made a four hour drive to Houston to see where my brother was going to live. I have never been to Houston, so I was excited to see how this suburban mecca was going to look. (Look out LA, you have competition). The thing is, some idiot on the Indystar message board rationalized the second bypass around Indy using Houston as an example. I do agree with this guy. Houston has very impressive highways – many lanes, overpasses, underpasses, etc. They are nicely paved. It is a very car oriented city. In fact, everyone I talk to thinks the highways are really nice when they are partaking in their two hour commute. It's obvious that this city thrives off the oil companies – you can tell. There is no way so many highways can survive without a supplement income.

I can't be too critical. My brother is moving to Houston, and he moved to the cooler area. So I support his move.

After returning to Baton Rouge, my brother and I went out: downtown. I love downtown outing; and it's really the only place to bar hop in Baton Rouge. At that point I had only been out downtown once. So I REALLY wanted to go to the Rasputin bar. This seemed like an awesome idea. Bar's named after Rasputin are very similar to coffee shops named after Nero – kinda weird. So we went inside - and it was pretty much dead. The girl-doorman swore that it was going to get CRAZY in a few hours. Then she demanded $5. Needless to say, my brother and I didn't want to wait a couple of hours for the craziness to take place. So we went to the Red Star to get some drinks. They have Guinness and Stella on tap. Stella isn't all that great, but Guinness is great on tap. Although, my brother swears that it is on tap everywhere around Purdue. (BTW, no one understands 'tap' here).

We left this place shortly, and decided to head back to Rasputin to see if it was 'crazy'. That's when we ran into some people who labeled themselves as 'river-people'. They were looking for a bar, so we pointed them to a place far in the distance with a neon sign, reading 'bar'. I had never been to this place either. So we followed them, and discovered they were from Kentucky and were river merchants. This was odd, but they were cool – in an odd way. We chatted with them for a while before migrating back to Rasputin. Things weren't exactly 'crazy', but we drank up anyway.