Day 13 - day 7 in Tucson

After a full night's rest, I was ready to start another day in Tucson. We picked up Katie at a local farmer's market where she volunteers each Tuesday morning. It was a pretty cool market, located in South Tucson a.k.a. "Little Mexico". I walked over to where Katie was vending some local produce and heard almost exclusively, Spanish conversations. It's great that Katie is able to do some good volunteer work while using her Spanish skills.

After dropping off Katie at her apartment, Mom, Dad, and I went to the Arizona State Museum. This place was great. It's located right in the middle of the U of A campus. In addition to its stellar location, it does a tremendous job covering the history of the American Indians of the Southwest. As Dad commented, "it's a half-day museum". We only spent 2 hours there. Needless to say, we didn't see everything or spend as much time as we should have on some exhibits.

Then we had a nice lunch at Marie Callender's. Since we knew we would be eating relatively early in the evening, we just had the soup and salad bar. Later for dinner, for the second straight day we arrived at a restaurant only to find that it was closed. Yesterday we tried to eat at Caruso's, an Italian restaurant in the downtown of Tucson. Caruso's is open every day except Monday. Today, it was Mi Nidito, a Mexican restaurant in South Tucson. We got there after much debate (we were warming up for tonight's event) over where to go to dinner, only to find that Mi Nidito is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. What are the odds that two days in a row we would go to two different restaurants and be turned away from both on account of them being closed during the week. I guess, being from the East coast, we just aren't accustomed to things being closed at all. We wound up going to Lovin' Spoonfulls, an entirely vegan restaurant in Tucson. It was delicious. They had the most amazing spiced iced tea. I had around 3 glasses of it since it was so good. I think we all enjoyed our meals. Dad and I got the special: sweet 'n sour "chicken". Katie got some stuffed pasta dish. Mom got tomato basil soup and spring rolls. I really enjoyed the ambience of that restaurant.

After dinner, I went to La Aldea (name of her apartment community) to watch the 2nd Presidential debate. They had sugar cookies and punch for those in attendance: blue icing(Obama), red icing (McCain), and no icing (undecided). I thought it was a unique idea. At the end of the debate, there were a lot of McCain cookies left. Judging by that "cookie poll" I'd say that Obama has a commanding lead among likely voters in La Aldea of the University of Arizona (located in McCain's state!). After the debate, Katie and I hurried over to where her Tuesday night bible study meets. It was nice to meet some new people and see some familiar faces that I had just met, again. Katie baked banana bread WITH sugar since she knew I was coming to Arizona and knows how much I love her banana bread. It was stupendous. We all enjoyed some at the conclusion of bible study.

I can't believe that we only have one more full day left in Tucson. It's a big day, though. It's Katie's birthday!