Friday night my fellow interns and I may have had the best night in Anchorage that we’ve had yet. We asked our bosses where we ought to take the engineering interns to impress upon them that architects, well, we know how to party [I have found that generally this is a true statement and that groups of architects tend to drink more and laugh more than any other group of people I’ve ever spent time with]. At any rate we decided to make a whole night of it, and told them of our plans.
We changed our plans right from the start. We got off work at five and the three of us were hungry. The engineers didn’t get done until six, but we decided to head to this little Mexican place anyway. The food there was good, even by the standards of folks who live around a lot of Mexicans, like us. We got to chat with the daughter of the folks that run the place, she tried to pull the tent covering us in the yard over, and we were pretty sure that she was going to try and sit with us and eat our tortilla chips, but she never got the guts to sit down.
After a filling our bellies, the engineers called to cancel on us so we packed up and hiked across downtown a little way to the Hilton where we proceeded to ride a scary elevator [the door tended to open before it actually finished moving]. There’s a restaurant on the 15th floor of the hotel and they have an open deck on which you can sit and enjoy expansive views of the inlet, the Cugach Mountains and all of the city of Anchorage. They also had live music, a quartet of middle aged folks who played a mixture of swing and jazz music. They also served fantastic drinks, including the Moose Juice [a mixture of banana liquer, crème de cacao, vanilla vodka and cream] and the Glacier Lemonade [orange vodka, lemonade, blue curaco and perhaps something else] which were no more expensive than the margaritas, etc we had drunk the week before.
After two drinks each we walked down the street to the Snow Goose to sit on their deck where we each had a cranberry and vodka and warm mixed berry crisp with vanilla ice cream. We did a lot of people watching, a lot of laughing, and a lot of reveling in being in the sun. We watched people on dates, guys dressed in denim shorts courting women dressed to show off a large amount of cleavage, women with giant hair courting men who looked uncomfortable to be in public. We also laughed, a lot. We decided to head back to our place in time to catch the 11pm bus [the last bus on Friday night] and basically had everyone at the bus stop move away from us because we were laughing so much. I believe the source of the funny was the potential to screw up our potential children.
On our way home we saw the most beautiful sunset, the sky was streaked with amazing, vivid reds and purples, painted in wide streaks. It also reflected down into the lakes and there were people sitting at the edges of the water, just watching. The mountains were also stained around the edges with hints of crimson, and had we not been on the bus I would have tried to capture it with my camera. Speaking of which, has anyone else ever noticed how incredibly hard it is to photograph a sunset because the photo never looks like it feels to be in that moment?