City Girl

The past couple of nights I've been enjoying some downtown Raleigh dining.  I usually love doing this on the weekends when we just take cabs and get dropped off at the restaurants.  However, since its the middle of the week and I've started working again there is no need for cabs on a Monday or Tuesday night anymore!  (Also, anyone that knows me, knows I am a terrible driver...curbs and street cones tend to jump out in front of me when I'm driving!)  Monday I took one of my best friends to dinner at humble pie to celebrate her birthday and then last night one of my favorite people ever, Betsy, was in town so Stephanie and I went to dinner with her at Capital Club 16.  Both places were amazing but I also had equally interesting parking situations both nights!!!

Monday night, after squeezing into a parking spot that was meant for a mazda Miata, Laura and I were walking to dinner when we were approached by an interesting man who was apparently a cook at Applebees and offered to trade us free food if we ever came to his restaurant if we gave him 20 dollars to fix a flat tire on his car...being the naive teacher I am, of course I started considering it but luckily I surround myself with much smarter people than I am and Laura quickly responded with, "Well where is the car", which was nowhere to be found, of course.  So we moved on to enjoy a wonderful dinner.  I hope that man was able to find a tire, or bottle of liquor...or whatever he was really planning on using that money for!

Then last night I was faced with one of my ultimate challenges finding parking downtown when I have to be forced to park in parking decks!  I was successful and ended up meet the girls at the restaurant.  Well of course I picked to park in a deck that was 3 blocks away from the restaurant instead of the 2 other closer decks.  we ended up staying at dinner until 11 so Stephanie offered to drop me off at the parking deck since recently there have been a few incidents with women being assaulted in downtown parking decks...just great.  Well this would have been perfect...if I didn't have her drop me off at the wrong deck.  Needless to say once I realized what happened I had to call her back and being the sweet Angel that she is, she came back and rescued me!  However it took me a few minutes to realize it was the wrong deck and Steph was no longer right outside...leaving me a sitting duck!  However, out of nowhere comes another Angel in a Security uniform who I convinced to sit with me outside of a closed restaurant until Steph rescued me!!!  He was so accommodating and now I understand the real importance of them, he made me feel much safer!  Needless to say, this girl isn't ready for big city living...yet!  However, I can locate the right people to help when in a crisis, so maybe I could make it after all! 
I also left my computer at the beach Sunday when I came back to Raleigh to start teaching summer school so i haven't been blogging lately but will catch up with all the 4th of July festivities when I go back to the beach this weekend and have time to upload some pictures!  Luckily the ESL program I'm teaching gives every kid and teacher an iPad to use so I haven't missed my computer too much and have been having fun getting to  FaceTime, especially since I've always been a PC girl and restricted to skype instead of the much cooler FaceTime!!!