Steamy in Baltimore...

I'm still in Baltimore and I'm ready to come home! This town is 'O.K." at best. See...I like to be able to get off the beaten path and roam around. However Baltimore is reaaaallly muggy and realllly urban so going exploring isn't a real interesting idea. The photo above is of the Hard Rock Cafe in Baltimore which is located in a place called The Power Plant near our hotel. It's basically obnoxious chain restraunts (Hard Rock, Chipotle, ESPN Zone, Barnes and Noble) but I have to admit, I've been to ESPN Zone 2-3 times. Good, cheap food and a gazillion TV's. I'm dying to find somewhere local and cool, but like I said, have no real desire to go find it. I think Edgar Allen Poe is buried around here too, but I have no clue where.

So far, my travelling companion and I have had fun. The first day we went to the Baltimore Aquarium, which was really cool! I'd say it's one of the nicest, coolest aquariums I've ever been to. They had a nice rain forest exhibit and a very cool "Outback Exhibit" with some cool bats. Then last night we went to the Orioles game. I tried to do an audio blog but it evidently didn't work. Camden yards was..."O.K." It's very pretty and very cool. Kind of the gold standard for new ballparks. But overall it just felt like a ballpark, nothing more, nothing less. You'd have to be a baseball fan to know what I mean. Like, once you got up into the hallways, it looked like any old stadium and there was no real sense of anything "special" about the park.

Oh! One funny/cool/unusual thing that happened was, I went to HOOTERS Thursday night! I love HOOTERS and not just for the girls. I like beer and wings and TV too. And I like the way Hooters is designed to always have the girls doing something subversively nawty. Like, the plates and cups are stacked way high around the walls so they have to reach way up to get them. I just find it hillariously distasteful. Plus, I like the way the waitresses flirt with you like their strippers, but you actually get food and beer from them at a regular tip price. Anyway, I met this guy at Hooters and we ended up talking music for a few hours. He gave me a 2-CD bootleg of THE BAND live outtakes! Sweet!

Other than that, I've been sitting in different conferences or sitting in my hotel reading THE RUINS by Scott Smith. My friend Neil reccommended it and HOLY SHIT...it's really, really good. Really f-ed up, but I can't stop reading it. I've only got 100 pages or so left and a 5 hour flight tomorrow so I'm trying to make it last till then. Don't know if I can though. I need to get out today/night as all I did was wake up late, not get into an overcrowded conference, go back to bed, read, go get a crab cake at the street fair outside (The Duhks were playing!) and then get a salad at ESPN Zone. I felt I should eat a salad. Maybe I'll go back to Hooters or something. I'll be glad to get home tomorrow!