An Afternoon Walk

I walked downtown from the bookstore where I work to Denver's Union Station yesterday afternoon.  I took 17th Street all the way down to the 16th Street Mall, and from there walked to Union Station. It was raining a little bit, but not too badly, and so I pushed on.  Seventeenth Street is considered a pretty hip neighborhood these days, and it has a lot of popular bars and restaurants.  The bar in the photograph on the left is called The Thin Man, and is a very popular nightspot. My mother Mary,  sister Susan, brother-in-law George and I stopped here for a drink once.  It was in the afternoon, and the only other people in the place were sitting at the bar.  The decor was a bit weird - lots of Catholic iconography, Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, and snapshots of people all along the walls.  My sister suggested the snapshots were probably some kind of dating service.  Take the photo up to the bartender and he'd fix you up.  In any case,  we were a bit boisterous that day, as I recall (my mother and sister burst into song at one point), and all 4 people at the bar stood up at the same time and left. Was it because we too loud, or because we weren't hipsters? I think now they went into the next room to play pool, but it did seem kind of weird at the time.

As I said before, the neighborhood is very popular, and I spotted the hipster mobile in the photograph on the right parked in front of a coffee shop on 17th.  This is exactly the kind of car I am looking for (if a Nash Metropolitan is unavailable), but if I bought one I am convinced it would be destroyed by Denver's infamous hail within weeks. In any case, the rain started to come down pretty hard when I hit the 16th Street Mall, and so I was damn glad I brought an umbrella.  My office-mate Peter says that "real" men don't carry umbrellas, but I am here to tell you there were some pretty wet "real" men downtown Saturday afternoon.

It was getting towards 7:00 P.M. as I approached Union Station, and so I decided I would dine with my fellow beautiful people.  I stopped at Subway and bought the $3.50 sub special, walked over to Union Station and ordered an Epic IPA at the Terminal Bar for $5.00 (their cheapest beer, I might add), found a nice table to sit at, and dined in style, all for $10.00.  Is this a beautiful universe, or what?  At least on the weekends, anyway.