An Epic Birthday Week – Episode I

I’ve been home for almost a week and I still don’t think I have fully recovered from my 10 days in California yet. It was over a week of non-stop eating and drinking to celebrate a number of things- my birthday, cousin Nancy’s birthday, Evy’s sendoff for business school, Mat’s birthday which just passed, and CS’s birthday which was coming soon. We did so many fun things it’s impossible to recount all the details, so I’m just going to do my best at a day-by-day recap of the highlights.

I flew out the day before my birthday and of course chose JetBlue so I could hit eat at JFK’s T5 (Terminal 5) again. I went to Piquillo and had their pulpo a la gallega which I am such a big fan of. Octopus, potato, olive oil, smoked paprika and coarse salt. Not bad for airport food, is it?

Piquillo Pulpo

The JetBlue experience was smooth as usual and I landed in San Jose about 20 minutes early. Cousins Tony and Charlie picked me up and we headed Strait to Santana Row, pun intended. Straits is a restaurant which at night is actually more of a bar scene with loud music, standing room only throughout much of the room, and most people dressed for clubbing which includes the hostesses and waitstaff. As such, I didn’t expect too much from the food, but felt fortunate to be able to get any decent grub considering it was already after 10pm. And in fact the dishes we got ranged from poor (the lemongrass beef), lackluster (the short ribs) to pretty good (the garlic noodles).

After a bit, Nancy, Lily, CS and crew arrived and the drinking began in earnest. One bizarro thing about all the places I’ve been at Santana Row are that apparently they do not have shot glasses. Whenever a shot was ordered, we would get what seemed to be about 4 oz. of booze in a rocks glass. When said booze was straight Patron, it was a rough “shot” that took three gulps in order to go bottoms up. Somehow I managed to get through four of these “shots” in the course of the evening while remaining upright. With the trip off to a start like this I was starting to wonder if my body would be able to endure over a week with these guys!

We ended up taking the party back to Lily and CS’s awesome just-renovated house. All kinds of funky angles to the rooms and very cool touches like exposed beams of manufactured lumber and counter tops made of crushed recycled bottles and cut to trapezoidal angles to match the lines of the house. We hung out in the man-cave that is their garage, complete with an arcade hoops machine and a kickboxing punching bag. It was a fun way to round out my first night, drinking wine and watching the awkwardness of cousin Tony working a phone number out of Lily and CS’s cute friend Linda. 🙂

One thought on “An Epic Birthday Week – Episode I

  1. Wat a way to start off the trip huh. haha I forgot I scored some digits haha = )

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