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December 2, 2009

Adventure #1: The Roach of the Windowpane

So you want a real adventure? Well I'm about to give you one and it may not be for the faint of heart. If you look at the title of this post, you may have an idea of what this is about. How strange this will get, you may find it a bit hard to believe. I couldn't make this up if I wanted to. So here it is. Sometime in the spring of 1990 (at some hot dog stand in Chicago's North Side), a friend and I were a bit hungry so we decided to get something to eat. That evening, my friends and their band played a show (concert) and I was there to help lug around some gear. After finding out the band would not play for another THREE hours (a story in itself), we had some time to kill (plenty of it). We knew the area pretty well so it wasn't like we didn't know what we were getting into..... or so we thought.

So out we went (me and my friend, Joe) in search of food. The others joined us a bit later (or we found them as you will soon see). All the places we knew of were pretty much to capacity. Under normal circumstances, we might have waited but we thought otherwise. I wish we had waited. We finally find this place about 3 blocks from where the band was playing. We check out the menu and had all the basics you would expect- hamburger, hot dogs (as common in Chicago as finding a Coke in Atlanta, GA), and so on. There was a pretty decent sized line as well. So we decided to just see what was coming off the grill- observing how it looked, portions, etc. On the surface, everything was fine.

Yep. Everything was fine.......until.........we sat by the window. Take out places normally have a sitting area by the window. This place had a bar-like table (about 8 feet in length) where you can sit and eat or wait. While we were killing time deciding what to eat, I noticed something was on the windowpane about 5 feet in height, which was painted black (this may not seem like much of a detail but this will make sense, so please work with me). We decided to get up and order some food then the event happened. At first I ignored it because I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I figured it was a fly or something of the like. It just stayed there and did nothing. Then I saw it move, as in crawl down the windowpane. I looked at Joe and told him to look at the window. He saw the same thing I did. A Cock Roach!!! That's right. Joe and I FROZE for a second, more in disbelief as it then crawled UP (a bit closer to a sprint) the windowpane and managed to keep its footing. Now I realize that bug do have a certain level of protein, but I would assume for them not to add their protein to the food being served. Those were not the double carbs I had in mind.

Joe and I did what any reasonable people would do. We got out of there and didn't let the door hit us on the way out. We went outside and we stood, more or less taking in the neighborhood. We passed that window again and not only did the roach crawl down the windowpane but were on the surface of the table. Fortunately, no one was sitting there at the time. We ran into our friends as we went back to the place they played. They said that how was the place that we went to because they were going to eat the same place. Joe and I looked at each other and told them "don't do it" with some level of friendly force behind our voices. They asked what was wrong. We told them that they don't want to eat there. We eventually told them later what we saw, explained the same way I am writing here. They didn't believe us at first, but after we both confirmed, they were quite appreciative for not letting them eat there. We did find a local chain to satisfy our hunger, though. Problem solved. For the record, that nameless hot dog stand is no longer in business. Gee, I wonder why?

1 comment:

Pam said...

Congrats on the foodie blogroll!

Enjoy!

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