One thing that really bugs me when I travel is how much it throws off my circadian rhythm, and I wake up crazy fucking early. So I woke up that morning at 6am. Derek was not into waking up with me, so I took a shower and did my hair. I fell asleep again at about 9 while Derek took his shower and packed us up, he woke me up at 10:30, and we headed to the restaurant we had been so excited about eating at. Of course, on he way, we got to see the good word:
I passed the message on to Allen. I'm nothing if not devoted to doing what billboards tell me to do!
We had a twenty minute drive through religious billboard territory, got a little lost because my car's GPS kind of sucks, but then....
Derek and I arrived there a 11:05, and we wondered if we made the right choice. We were in an entire strip mall full to the brim of places that sounded AMAZING. Lots of hot pot, and we've been missing hot pot since we left island.
And CHILI SPOT!!!! Our favorite place to eat in STL!!!
A WAGYU shabu shabu??? I don't eat meat, but I was impressed. It wasn't open yet, so it wasn't a choice, but Derek and I were walking toward Du Bu Gong Bang exclaiming over everything. Eeeeeee! I love food experiences with Derek!!
Well how the fuck are we supposed to make a decision here?? Just kidding, we were both crazy excited to eat at Du Bu Gong Bang. House made tofu, fresh every day??? STOP IT.
The vibe in there is so cute. And look! A TREE!
AND my forever hot man piece.
We ordered fairly modestly for us, mostly because we had 9 hours on the road and driving on super full tum tums is never fun.
I ordered the black sesame tofu with stir fried kimchi, Derek ordered the kimchi jjigae and galbi. There were a thousand things on the menu that sounded absolutely amazing, and Derek and I were like, ok, obvy this is where we eat on the way home. Which we did not, and I will for sure talk about why later.
Our ban chan was fucking SPECTACULAR. Their kimchi was...you know...kimchi. Deek loved the fermented pickled radish, I did not (the taste was nice, but the texture was not my friend), the potato ssalad was god damn dynamic, and those soy beans were a fucking DREAM. I asked Derek to save the steamed cabbage for my food, and he very graciously did.
And then our meals came.
The black sesame tofu was absolutely gorgeous, but the real fuckin' MVP was the stir. Fried. kimchi.
Oh.
My.
GAWD.
The stir fried kimchi is the fucking sluttiest, most delicious thing I have ever put in my mouth, and coming from someone EQUALLY slutty who has put a vast number of things in her mouth, that's really, really saying something. I was instantly obsessed, and now I need to learn to stiry fry kimchi just like that. It has such an incredible depth of flavor, and when I tasted the kimchi with the ban chan, I wasn't expecting anything tremendous out of the stir fried kimchi. Way to fucking overload my expectations. Ungfffghghhh. Sensational.
I made little wraps with the stir fried kimchi, some tofu, and steamed cabbage and I was elevated to nirvana with every fucking bite.
Derek's galbi smelled amazing, he said it was very very good.
Derek's kimchi-jjigae. It was really fucking good. And we spent the duration of our brunch talking about how to improve our own jjigae. I think we've settled on stir-frying the kimchi, using that to make the jjigae, and then letting it stew down for a couple of hours. I had Rhyann pick me up two jars of kimchi when I got home, so those are currently funkifying in our fridge right now (we age our kimchi for a few months before we make jjigae, and it's juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust about soup/stew season, so. Funk time is now! But it was that fucking good that we talked about it for hours on the drive to my dad and Caryn.
Of course, Derek's rice had gorgeouos soul. He loved it.
Sadly, Derek and I left these at the restaurant. But they looked nice!
From here, we filled up with gas, got me some fizzy water, and made our way to Boca. We decided we would go to St. Augustine on the way home, so our drive was going to be straight through. Which meant more ridiculous shit on full display! Billboard AND confederate flags! Plural.
This is maybe my favorite billboard that I've ever seen. And really, the only positive billbard we saw throughou our travels through the south.
It makes me so fucking embarrassed that we still use plantations as tourist attractions. This was maybe a half mile from a several miles long stretch of confederate flags, so like. no surprise. And this is in the south, s again, no surprise. Not to say this shit isn't EVERYWHERE, but I think, as jarring as seeing it is anywhere, seeing in the south you're like....oh, well, yeah, contextually that tracks.
Then my other favorite billboards rolled by. I wish I had been able to get better photos, because oh my god. Oh other people's god, is morer like it, but here we go.
There is a LOT to be unpacked here. "Have you made a decision....Jesus" and then i-will-be-back.org...there is a fucking lot. One...is the Jesus there a sign of exasperation? Like, have a made a fuckin' decision yet? JESUS!. Or is it using ellipses to correctly remove the rest of the sentence and it should read "have you made a decision [yet regarding how much you believe in] Jesus". But the part that really made me laugh was the website. I will be back. I. As in first person. As in Jesus made his own website. I told Derek I was so tempted to go to he website to see if it was written in the first person, because if it is...presumptuous. And if it isn't, why not make the website HE will be back? I had a lot of questions. And while this organization had other billboards on our journey, hey did not answer any of my questions.
Can't read that? Here, let me help.
Again...the tone here is so confusing. Are we exasperated still? Join the living. JESUS. Or are they telling Jesus to join the living? Like, is his mocking him about being sacrificed by his dad and dying? Hard to tell.
But wait, there's more!
Feaar not. Come on in! The zombies really make me laugh. Ad the person doing Jesus's own pose in the background, trying to steal his thunder? Fantastic.
This is 10000000% how Derek and I sound when we're trying figure out dinner plans. You decide. JESUS.
There were so fucking many of these billboards, but these were the only ones I could get a readable photo of.
A few hours after our amazing billboard journey, we hit Florida:
It is debatable whether or not Florida welcomes us or not, but we were there regardless.
I was hungry, I needed to stretch my legs, I needed to pee, so we stopped in Orlando, I grabbed come food, and I laughed at a random weather warning I had on my phone:
What a funny thing, we said together! Just this one area in Florida had a hurricane warning! And I wrote it off as a fluke.
We saw a great mural under an overpass in Orlando:
and we had a pretty uneventful three hour drive to Boca.
We got in, got our shit together, sat down for Derek to eat, and saw...it wasn't just a fluke. A fucking hurricane was coming. And because I read Al Jazeera and Propublica, I had no fucking idea. Deek listens to NPR. He had no fucking idea. What. What the fuck. Er...JESUS.
Fucking JESUS. Amazing timing. Well. Nothing to do about it now other than ride it out like a Floridian.
We had been warned that Jade, Caryn's cat, was not friendly. But she tolerated Derek pretty immediately.
And then we went to bed. It had been a long day, and we had a long few days ahead of us, full of all manner of work.
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