{"id":115,"date":"2006-03-31T10:40:42","date_gmt":"2006-03-31T10:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/?p=115"},"modified":"2006-03-31T10:48:06","modified_gmt":"2006-03-31T10:48:06","slug":"blue-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/?p=115","title":{"rendered":"blue elephant"},"content":{"rendered":"

(After talking a big game<\/a> about making a post every day, I dropped that ball in the second inning. I guess I’ll have to do two posts today to make up for it.)<\/p>\n

Two nights ago, Amy and I went to the Blue Elephant, the best (and to our knowledge, only) Thai restaurant in Beirut. Our dinner was a wedding present from our friends Matthew and Mary Ann and we were under explicit instructions to order the Royal Thai Banquet for two. What a royal banquet indeed. I didn’t even know what a lot of the dishes were, but they were all good and the main attraction was seasoned chicken wrapped in banana (?) leaves.<\/p>\n

A great time was had by all (even if they didn’t have the right beer<\/a>).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I spent a large part of the night trying to figure out how to acquire one of those sweet Blue Elephant ashtrays. I considered simply asking whether I could take or even purchase one, but I thought my request might be deemed weird and refused and then I would be forever branded as “that weird ashtray fetishist” among the staff. I also considered just taking one (as I was sure they had crates of them in back…there are Blue Elephant locations around the world) and leaving a big tip in exchange for their complicity. However, I had last-minute panic about running up against classic Lebanese entrepeneurial spirit. To wit, “Despite the fact that these people just spent a large sum of money on dinner for two, I am going to harrass them over a 15 cent ashtray and thus deep-six the chances of them (or any of their friends) ever coming here again.” I’m sure it’s all in my head, but clearly a suitably complex scheme is required. Next time we go I’m going to have Amy create a distraction and then…<\/p>\n

This is the hand-made card in which our wedding gift came. It was sitting on top of the computer monitor for a while. It has some Stella artwork…or possibly poetry…inside.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thanks Matthew and Mary Ann!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(After talking a big game about making a post every day, I dropped that ball in the second inning. I guess I’ll have to do two posts today to make up for it.) Two nights ago, Amy and I went … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.plutino.net\/journals\/ethan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}