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| By the end of our visit to the Strip District, John was just as cheerful as when we first met him earlier that day. |
Have you ever been witness to a day when you knew it was going to be wonderfully amazing, enjoyable, and beyond any sensible reconstruction of words that just wouldn't seem to do justice to your experiences? Perhaps the term you might anticipate using at some point is "epic." I suppose from my lens epic-ness is an all-too-familiar concept applicable in my world of food, but without a doubt my trip with Brianne last weekend was nothing less than that. For reasons that will be much clearer in part 2 of this epic food day
post, Brianne and I made our way over to Pittsburgh (hopefully the first
of many more sites in the future), a drive that only took us about
three hours to complete. She had never been, and I had visited just once
prior (somehow over three years ago); still there was an interesting
familiarity in the air, as if nothing has since changed. As we
eventually learned from John (pictured above, making sure to have worn his "funny hat" [his words, not mine]) at the end of our trip
throughout
the Strip District, the main focus of this post, quite a bit has changed in terms of developing this part of the city. What has remained consistent in the past 35 years or so is the downtown foodie destination that is "The Strip," a historic conglomeration of
retail produce and ethnic food stores, restaurants and coffee shops. Without a doubt, our time ahead was not to be merely epic, which in itself crams too many words and emotions into four little letters. To quote John, who has worked at the Pittsburgh Public Parking site (21st and Smallman St) for the past 35 years or so, the first half of our day in Pittsburgh was everything he'd hoped it would be for us, summarised in five (okay, technically six) letters: "a blast!"
