Monday, October 8, 2007

Happy Birthday, Dennis and Monday Movie Review

Happy Birthday, Dennis Kucinich! In honor of his birthday, actually Rob has no idea it is D's b-day today since he is not in love with him like I am, we went out for dinner at a new restaurant in town. It is always an adventure trying out a new place to eat when you are vegan. It isn't like we live in Portland or Seattle, or even Chicago so it is very hit or miss.

We were pleasantly surprised and then disappointed tonight with Papa George (a new Greek place in town). I should have checked the menu online first, but we were in a hurry since I had to ship some packages out before UPS closed. Rob was sweet enough to go in and check out the menu before we got all the kids out in the rain. We used to frequent Mediterranean places in the DC area and miss that very much.

I think they are getting the kinks out at Papa George because the waitress had a long list of things which had changed on the menu. Most of it was meat-based items so we really didn't pay attention. I saw that the dolmades were label "vegan" on the menu at the restaurant and we asked if a couple items had cheese or dairy and she said they were vegan so this lured us into thinking this would be easy. I mentioned that we were all vegan and we'd appreciate if she would double check to make sure nothing had dairy that we ordered. She was happy to do so. We ordered: hummus, dolmades, gigantes, and skordialia (which they added grilled zucchini slices to). It was wonderful! We all enjoyed it and we ordered a second of this (they are all pretty much appetizers). We also ordered two fruit cups off the kid's menu. I didn't have a menu in front of me when Rob ordered (with the non-dairy blessing of the waitress) Pastitsio. Of course, when the Pastitsio came out it had dairy so we didn't eat it, but the side of rice and green bean salad with tomatoes was fine. It took a long time after we were done to get the check, but the waitress saw we didn't eat the Pastitsio (when she brought it out, I asked again if it had dairy and she said her manager said it didn't...this gave us a very bad feeling) so she took it off our bill. Rob suggested she just give us half off, but she took it all off. Very nice and even after the Pastitsio issue, we would eat there again. Parker kept going on about the food and ate a bunch of dolmades (his favorite). Sorry, I didn't take my camera this time to get pictures.

Monday Movie Review: The Fountain
Fountain
I guess I'm sort of into films about death lately. I guess that is appropriate with Halloween approaching. Although, I would say this movie was also a love story and as much about life as it was about death. I wasn't as distracted by the back and forth into the different time periods as I thought I would be. My biggest critique is about the animal experimentation. I'm anti-animal experimentation and don't like to see it used in film. I do have to say, the way they brought it up was interesting and at first I thought they were performing surgery on a human so maybe that could be a good thing to make people think. The film would have worked fine without it. The tree of life theme with the Christian and Buddhist undertones was interesting. I like the messages I gleaned from the film and would watch it again.

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