Taste

Despite my best efforts to stay awake, I ended up taking a nap this afternoon since I kept falling asleep while typing up my torts notes. After napping, Alvin and I went out for dinner... at the Taste of Chicago.

Even though it was Monday night and sticky and humid and hazy, it wasn't that much less crowded than it was on Saturday in the early afternoon. (That big open section of sidewalk in the picture was rare.) I expected it to be a lot less crowded, but I've had a history of underestimating everything lately. There were about 275,000 people at Taste on Saturday - I should have expected that, but instead I thought it would be easy to get soap actor autographs!

Here's a street shot from tonight:



An example of one of the booths. The numbers indicating "price" refer to tickets, not dollars. The festival sells ticket strips in sets of 11 for $7. What's good about each booth is that they have a "taste portion" for 3 tickets, so you can try different things from each restaurant instead of spending all your tickets in one place. Some places have larger taste portions than others. At this booth, we got the catfish. It was good.



This large samosa from Arya Bhavan (they're up on Devon) was a taste portion. Compared to the sizes of the taste portions at some other booths, it was really big! And it was so good. We plan to go back to Taste to try some more stuff another day and back to the samosas we shall return. (I also have a little obsession with samosas...)



And now for a Taste classic... the turkey leg from Helen's. Alvin told me about it in his past stories about Taste and I was really curious about it since so many people there were eating them. I only had about two bites (all I really wanted, although it was good), but I can understand why this 9 ticket item is a big seller. I imagine it must be really filling too, so I can't figure out how some people eat a turkey leg and then more full plates of food from other booths (I saw people with lots of food on Saturday).



So... I did a little bit of half-asleep work this afternoon, took a nap, went to Taste, took a long shower after getting back and having a frozen lemonade, and now I'm tired again and want to (and should) go to bed. I really need to start doing more work!