Tonight I decided to skip the gym, and decided that Mr P and I NEEDED to explore this wonderful city we live in.  I looked up a few places on my lunch break, we ate leftover chicken/hot Italian sausage pot roast, then headed out!


First we stopped at Europa, a "Polish Meat Market" a few blocks away from us.  Hoping to find a place where we could snag any kind of meat, I was sort of disappointed, but sort of delighted at the same time.  This place turned out to be more of a deli that meat market, but their meats looked pretty decent, at pretty reasonable prices too!  It looked like they made their own sausages, possibly deli meat too, so we will be returning when we are needing some lunchmeat and really give a good review!  We will definitely be sure to try their homemade beef jerkey (though we can make our own, it just looked sooooo good).

Next we went across the street to a bakery called "Made With Love".  We really had no intentions of buying anything, so when a lady, named Celeste, came out to greet us, Mr P proceeded with "hi, we are new to the neighborhood, blah blah blah" and worked his charm on her.  Turns out she used to live in Ohio too!  She used to be a designer for Express and used to live in the German Village (small world, right??).  She told us about a gallery hop-type thing going on tomorrow night (guess we're not having our relaxing night at home anymore, the gallery hop sounds like so much fun!!), and she's going to be open, featuring the art that splashed her walls (I MIGHT be tempted to buy one of his yellow pieces for our yellow accents in the bathroom).  We didn't end up buying anything, yet her entire bakery smelled of gingerbread cookies, so we will be sure to stop by tomorrow and buy some :D

We continued our stroll through Van Vorst Park, and into the Zeppelin Hall (and beer garden).  This place is HUGE, and apparently has LIVE BAND karaoke on Thursdays!? Yes, please!  We will be returning next Thursday.  Our half liter German draft beers were a mere $6/each, and the bartender, Peter from Slovakia, was very friendly.  I had been to this place once before, remembering that my beer had notes of clove and banana.  The bartender knew exactly what I was talking about, and he had me taste just one, and I knew it was it!  So good... it was light, yet full-bodied and sweet, but not sugary sweet.



Next we headed to The Iron Monkey, where they had several non-traditional beers on tap, which were good, not great, but good.  The BEST part about this place was the music.  While we were there, they played Neon Trees, The Naked and Famous, MGMT, The Kooks, Coldplay, etc.  We will be back.

So, it wasn't exactly the date night we had a few weeks ago, but we still had our laughs and smiles, and walked arm and arm through it all :D

Cheers to a great weekend ahead!
J&H