Last weekend’s Pittsburgh trip: not much to talk about.

Saturday morning, a package I’d ordered arrived: new Teva sandals. I put them on and went for lunch at the Prudential mall food court, which was overrun with costumed attendees of the Anime Boston convention. Pretty surreal.

Joy of Life
Allegheny Cemetery
Pumpy cat
Prawn the cat
Full Photoset

Grabbed my bag and left home, but on the way out, I received another package I’d been waiting for: a second battery for my video camera. Threw that in my bag and made my way to Logan.

The flight was fine except the descent into Pittsburgh was bumpy due to wind. The woman next to me squealed on touch-down. Weather a balmy 82 degrees but overcast.

Hit a grocery store that Inna wanted to visit, then dinner at Maharaja, an Indian restaurant tucked inside a Days Inn by the highway. It was set in a long-abandoned ballroom, with used dinner plates littering several of the many empty tables. To my horror, Inna violated my first rule of Indian—never order the buffet!—and it delivered in spades. Spots in the steam table labeled rice and naan were empty, and what food there was looked like it had been sitting on the Sterno for months. At least they didn’t serve Goat Bone Curry like Ajanta used to!

Since Inna’s mother was traveling, we stopped by to feed her cats Theo and Pumpy, then called it a day.

Sunday was Easter, so I tried to get Inna to sample a chocolate bunny, but she refused. We spent a mostly lazy day doing not much of anything, since most places were closed for the holiday. We walked around Shadyside and had ice cream at Oh Yeah!, then drove around at random, ending up having a nice walk around the reservoir at the summit of Highland Park.

After feeding mom’s cats, we went to a place called Thai Cuisine on East Liberty, which was unmemorable, then home so that Inna could study.

Monday I walked down to the Fifth Third Bank and snagged some small bills, then off for ice cream at Klavon’s. Drove around Lawrenceville, and saw three deer in Allegheny Cemetery. Back in Squirrel Hill, we stopped at Radio Shack to pick up Livestrong wristbands for the cats to play with, and chocolate for us.

Dinner was a burger at the Elbow Room in Shadyside, which wasn’t bad, then we went home and played “Wits & Wagers” and some “World of Goo” game on Inna’s Wii.

Tuesday I packed up and we hit the Waterworks Mall where Inna shopped for clothing while I picked up some Eneloop batteries and found a kitten to play with at Petco. We made our way out to Moon Township and had a tasty lunch at Mad Mex before saying our goodbyes at the airport.

All told, it was a very low-key visit, which seems pretty typical of Pittsburgh. Atypical, however, were the mediocre meals, since my experience has been that the thing Pittsburgh usually gets right is its food. But the weather was pretty gorgeous for early April, which made a nice change from the freezing cold of my previous two visits. Mostly it was good to see Inna, since she’s been buried up to her eyeballs all year with work for the one-year sustainability MBA program she’s enrolled in.

For the past seven weeks I’ve been attending adult ed classes in Thai at BCAE, mostly to see if I could build up enough of a knowledge of the language to be able to travel in Thailand outside the cities. Since Asian languages are very difficult for Americans, I thought it’d also be interesting intellectual challenge. And at $150 for seven sessions of nearly one-on-one instruction, the price couldn’t be beat.

In the end, I think I confirmed my self-perception as someone who picks up languages and pronunciation quickly. Actually, I found Thai pretty easy, since its grammar and sentence structure is very straightforward. I did have to pay extra attention to pronunciation, since Thai, like Chinese, is a highly tonal language. And thankfully we only studied conversational speech, since reading and writing the Thai alphabet looks like an immense challenge.

There’s still some debate about whether there’ll be a “level two” class or not. If so, I’ll certainly join it, since we’re just reaching the point where we have enough vocabulary to start conducting pretty open conversations. Although I haven’t heard anything about level two yet.

If it is not offered, I’m not likely to drop $200 on language learning software, and I imagine that in the absence of anyone to practise with, what Thai I’ve learned will fade away, as happened with all my other language skills (French, German, Russian, and ASL). But at least it’ll be there to call upon if I ever do think about visiting Southeast Asia.

Frequent topics