Welcome to Shangri La

Okay so i know i said i would be posting more. I am thinking of posting more often, soon. There is a button on the Blogger website that lets a person "Sign up for mobile Blogging!". I can't even manage to sign in from the real, live internet, much less do it from my phone - i guess i'm behind a little. But this post is about St Louis, not Blogland.

My housemate and i went out for breakfast over the weekend. I happen to absolutely love going out for breakfast. Its one of my favorite treats. So i had heard about this place, Shangri La (no, silly, its a restaurant in St Louis!) that is all vegetarian or specializes in veggie food. It had moved steadily up the priority list as i continually knocked into stores, restaurants, and food-sellers who are NOT interested in providing vegetarian goods (or local, or organic). These are all things i seek out, and demand as a consumer, so as my options dwindled, Shangri La climbed the list. Anyhoo (ah, you can hear the midwest in me already!), we arrive at Shangri La eatery and i promptly declared it my new favorite place. It is ALL vegetarian (!), and it is a tricked out, retro-metro psychedelic hipster place. I felt like i had landed in...yep...Shangri La!

So we choose a table, which was surrounded by a sort of curtain fashioned from plastic half-dollar size disks strung together suspended from the ceiling so it sort of looks like you're surrounded by hanging flat bubbles or earrings. It might have been the dazzle of the curtains, but as my housemate sat down, he scooted his chair just so, and the next thing we know, a palm tree fashioned from metal, plastic sheeting and LED light ropes came crashing down onto the table next to us. We hadn't even ordered coffee yet, and i was sure we would be kicked out and told to never return. The crash spilled beverages of all sorts all over the neighbors, plus gave one woman a serious walloping (midwest again - like it?). Everyone who wasn't crushed by falling objects leapt to their feet, trying to mop things up and apologize profusely and clear debris. Meanwhile, my housemate was wrestling with his anger and embarrassment, and tried to rightside up the palm tree, which only entangled the ill-fated sculpture in the dazzling curtains. It was a mess. It was like the clowns in the circus. However, it turns out that no one at the crushed table had gotten their food yet, and the lady who got the whacking wasn't hurt (much) and so the staff let us all stay (and paid for the other table's - 6 people! - food). The amazing thing to us was that the servers wanted to (and did, in the end) leave the tree where it was - in this precarious and unbalanced situation. But my housemate is a trooper and we both decided to face down the embarrassment and sit down and get breakfast.

Now, at this point, you probably don't believe any of this happened. I'm making it up, right? There's no place called Shangri La and there's no way i was part of a destructive posse! That's preposterous! Well, you'll have to take my word for it. It happened. OR - you could call the DEPUTY MAYOR of St Louis, because (i'm STILL not kidding) that's precisely the "lady that got a good whacking". She was also surrounded by several top lawyers. The server told us this after they left - otherwise i might have had to crawl out the window of the bathroom in shame (and so they'd never associate me with this incident!). As i was chalking this up as one of my most embarrassing moments, mentally making notes so i could tell you all about it, all that kept running through my head was: Welcome to St Louis! Welcome to Shangri La! I think i'm morally obligated to go donate to the Deputy Mayor's campaign now...