A Day out with the Gang

This Saturday I spent a day out with the gang ("the gang" being my friends Michael, Tony and Evan who are a gang only insofar as they refer to themselves as such and tend to chant cult-like incantations when they want to convince me to do something).

We went to Dinkytown where we ate at Raising Cane's, an establishment that serves only chicken fingers and requisite accoutrements (as well as a dipping sauce so delicious that is rumored to be flavored with crack).



The menu presented a problem for me, as I'd been a vegetarian/vegan/pesca-vegetarian for the last 8 years (aside from occasional nibbles of poultry that were sanctioned by my moral code of meat-eating, which I won't go into at this point, and this one time that I ate sausage by accident). I randomly decided to opt for a new experience over dogmatism, so I had the meal pictured below:



It tasted good and I really enjoyed it. However, the texture of chicken is kind of unfamiliar and disturbing. Plus meat necessarily has an aftertaste of shame and guilt due to my knowledge of factory farms and because afterward I couldn't stop thinking about the word "flesh." (gross.) I probably am not going to eat chicken again any time soon.

We had to pick up some things, so we walked to the Hideaway, which is a great place to pick things up.

On our way back we walked through the U of M campus along scholars walk and stopped to admire the wall of discovery (Tony, our unofficial tour guide, pointed out one particularly admirable development---they invented the processes used to puff wheat and rice, an innovation which paved the way for the puffed-grain breakfast cereals we know and love today). Then we saw this very large statue:



On the ride home, I photographed Michael either right before or after flipping off a biker:



My day out with the gang was full of new experiences and adventure. It is exactly what I was hoping for when I decided to study domestic, and I can't wait for more!