Thursday

I've been going to a lot of things lately. Tonight's thing was easy: fifteen minutes in my own apartment building. We've taken to having monthly wine tastings in the lounge. These are always on Thursday nights. Because they are held in the lounge, I get invited, then re-reminded urged and cajoled, every day for a week. All day on Wine Day they busily run around cooking hors d'oeuvre, moving furniture around, and loudly wet-vacuuming beside my lounge chair. The first of these I skipped outright, but the lounge guys had worn me down by the following month. That Wine Night I hung out for fifteen minutes talking to the only fellow attendee I knew, Sunshine, while consuming cubes of cheese and awful Australian wine. Tonight was the same, except the wine was pretty good and the hors d'oeuvre were crusts of yellow meat and bread. Oh, but the event I've been meaning to mention is the Annual Consular Community Bazaar held last Saturday. It was awesome. All the consulates around town band together and throw a kind of upscale cultural flea market. New Zealand's table collects and sells used books. Spain had sangria, Japan some kind of oven-safe Tupperware, and Mongolia framed photographs of the horizon line. Australia had beer cozies, which worked out nicely because the nearby US table was selling cases of Budweiser. I've never realized how much a box of Bud reminds me of our flag. The bazaar was very crowded with people from all over Earth, many dressed in traditional costume. The ladies at the Kuwait table were very nice. We were left pondering whether it was legal for us to buy things from the Cuba table. They really looked like they were having a fabulous time, and the food over there smelled wonderful. [Cavin]