It rained for the first time since I came to the US. It was bitterly cold outside, and I could feel my hair turning to ice while waiting for a cab outside the hotel. Reminded me of how it was like when I was in UIUC 2 years ago, when the wind seemed to be whipping the skin off my face.

Our solution was to get ourselves some spicy Indian food. We had originally wanted to go to this vegetarian restaurant called Nirvana, but it was closed on Sundays. Fortunately, we found another Indian restaurant (through the yellow pages, very very luckily) just 2 blocks down, called Bombay Palace. The had a buffet special on weekends, although it was only like 7 dishes. They were average, all probably Americanized to make sure it wasn’t too spicy for their caucasian clientele.

We went over to Pentagon City to take a walk, mostly at Borders, and subsequently proceeded to Chinatown (again, in search of soup). This time, we stopped at Le Garden, a reasonably big restaurant (certainly bigger than any Asian place we’ve been to). The food was somewhat disappointing though. The hot and sour soup was neither, the dumplings were too thick to chew through, but the string beans were acceptable. Interestingly, at a table next to ours, this American woman complained to the waitress that her wontons were not hot enough. The waitress mistook that to mean they weren’t spicy enough, until she told the linguistically-challenged one that it was cold, like taken out from the fridge. Certainly made me very glad I didn’t order the wontons.

By evening time, temperatures have reached freezing point. Seemed really meaningless to go out in search of food when it was this cold, so I used this delivery service found on the web. Had originally looked forward to some nice tom yam soup from Bangkok One, but 2 hours after I placed the order, I called to check the status of my order, and to my horror was told they had no record of anyone taking the order. Somehow, this must mean I imagined the conversation right? After all, how else could I have given the item numbers found on the menu, and heard the telephone person match it EXACTLY with the item name? And tell me important details such as “your food will be delivered in 1 hour and 15 mins” and “the total will be $39.46, and this does not include the tip for the rider”. Furthermore, I discovered this morning (Monday, Apr 12) that the hotel bill listed TWO phone calls to the delivery service place –> indicating that I must have called twice, once to order, and the second time to check its status. Freaking hell.