[evangelists & spiked milkshakes]

Today a dear friend from middle school was in Baltimore! She's lived out on the West Coast for years and just moved to DC a week ago.

We met up down by the aquarium. While I was waiting for her to get there, I was approached by a couple of nervous looking high school girls. They wanted to ask me a few questions so I obliged. Turns out they wanted to talk about Jesus. We chatted for a few minutes (they seemed perplexed by my belief in purgatory) and after a while they gave me a book and went on their merry way. I knew that I was in for an interesting day from that moment forward.

We kicked off our reunion with lunch at La Tasca. We split a few tapas dishes and a half pitcher of sangria blanca.

That shrimp was my jam: sautéed in olive oil with garlic and hot peppers. So amazingly delicious. Crazy that I ate shrimp less than a week after coming down with food poisoning from some bad shrimp, but hey. This was delicious shrimp. After hours on the patio, we finally left. 

I took her up to my neck of the woods--Mount Vernon. We wandered around Mount Vernon Place United Methodist and tried to go to the Peabody Library. Unfortunately we were rather rudely informed that we needed an appointment to get into the library on a Saturday. After playing with the feathered ones back at my place, we swung into Red Emma's for a cup of coffee (or in my case, an iced chai tea latte). Red Emma's is the awesomely quirky little bookstore and coffe shop that sells almost exclusively communist, socialist, and anarchist literature.

From there it was back down towards the water for a tour of Federal Hill. We wandered around Cross Street Market, and popped in a boutique that doubles as a tattoo studio. Don't worry Mom--I didn't get one.

Next it was off to dinner at The Abbey. We split an incredible hulk milkshake, which consists of pistachio ice cream, gran marnier and brownie chunks. So amazing! My friend had a veggie burger that looked delicious and I had a burger made from wild boar meat. I only had about half my burger but it was amazing. 

Finally we made our way back down to the Harbor for a little shopping and just ambling. The sunset was beautiful:

It was an amazingly wonderful day, if I do say so myself.