The Good, The Bad, and The Burgh: My Travels to Pittsburgh Part 5

Ok, so I left you on a big cliffhanger, and a lot of build up for this post, so it hurts be to have to tell you that certain details about this ay have been forgotten, such as where I ate lunch, and the name of where we ate dinner. However, there is still some really good stuff I do remember, and after this we are on the downward slope of this journey.

By this point, it's starting to feel real

Friday March 25 Afternoon
As I've already stated certain details are now being lost due to by delayed writing of this post, such as specific times, but this afternoon is when I finally presented my paper. It was a little unfortunate that one of my roommates was presenting her paper at the same time I was, but I still managed to gather a respectable crowd in my conference room.

As I mentioned earlier (or maybe I didn't It's been a while) each presentation had a similar theme. I presented my paper with four other women, all of whom also were presenting creative nonfiction pieces that were somehow related to family. My piece was about the death of grandfather (copies available upon request). There was a piece about a woman who witnessed her uncles beating up her father when she was a child, and how she had to lie to the police about it. There was a piece about a girl experiencing a wonderful day on the lake with her family. It was a scene of family serenity that would not last. There was also a piece about a girls sister who either committed suicide or attempted suicide (and I fell terrible for not being able to remember). I can't remember what the final piece was about.

Afterwards there was a short Q&A, with pretty typical questions, like what do you write? who do write for? Who do you let read your pieces? Stuff like that. It was a very enjoyable experience, and I look forward to participating again next year. One man said we were the best panel he had attended so far at the conference, so that was a good confidence booster.
I then went next door to attend the final panel one of our group was participating, and then since our entire group had finally made it to Pittsburgh, we decided to find a place we could all have dinner together.

5:30 p.m.-ish
Since we had already been to most of the restaurants in the immediate vicinity of the hotel we had to venture out a ways into Pittsburgh. Twelve of us in all, 11 females and one male, traipsing their way through the streets of Pittsburgh without the slightest idea of where to go. After about a half hour of walking and debating what kind of food we wanted to eat, we stumbled upon a small pub.
The nice thing about Pittsburgh is that they have great beer on tap everywhere you go, so i enjoyed a nice burger with a Samuel Adams Boston Lager. It really hit the spot.
We then went back to the hotel on a more direct route, and waited for that evenings speaker session to begin.

8 p.m.
That evenings speaker was Kay Ryan former Poet Laureate. Here presentation was interesting but I cannot remember anything specific from it, but I did enjoy it for the most part, although I do remember she wasn't terribly charismatic.

I couldn't tell if it was a man or woman either

9 p.m.
This is where the fun begins. Kaela and Kellie and I went back to our room to prepare for our night out on the town. Unfortunately, while there were other people on the trip who were 21, no one else seemed to want to join us for our adventure to the South Side. Their loss, cause we had a damn good time.

We got a cab, which was an older gentleman who couldn't hear very well. We had to tell him everything about three times before he heard us. We wanted him to take us to the South Side, and told him we were from Wisconsin. He had been to Milwaukee once to see a Brewer's game. Good for him. We asked him if there was a good spot for college student's, to which he informed us, he wouldn't have any idea about that. Thanks a lot buddy. He also forgot to turn on the fare until about halfway through the ride which was still kind of expensive. He told us he would drop us off at Mario's which was right in the middle of everything and then we could find our way from there.

As we turned onto the street, I finally felt like I was in  city, people everywhere, bumper to bumper traffic, noise, this is what I had been missing from Pittsburgh and we had finally found it. We saw one or two spots that looked promising and when he dropped us off at Mario's we back tracked a little to the Carson City Saloon. Why was there a bar named after Carson City in Pittsburgh? I have no idea. but this place was pretty cool.

The Carson City Saloon in the daytime

It was built inside an old bank, and still had a big-ass vault in it. They were selling $2 bottle of Bud Light, and they were playing some decent music. There was a creepy older guy (by older i mean like thirties) that was trying to hit on Kellie and after some strong urging we got her to dance with him for a little. Then the guy just stalked her the rest of the night so we tried to hide her. The beer got increasingly expensive as the night went on which is something that happens in bars I guess. Again, this whole East Coast bar scene is entirely foreign from anything I had previously experienced.
We stuck around there for a while then tried our luck down the road, This place had a special on Guinness, $3 a pint, so i got one of those, but otherwise the place was dead, so we moved back to the Saloon.

Here Kaela and Kellie met some gentlemen, so I let them talk while I explored the rest of the bar. There was a cool kind of upstairs balcony where you could see everything going on down below. It was up here that I also say the DJ booth was perched on top of the entrance. I also saw that there was a line of lopped string running from the bar to the DJ booth. The line had two plastic cups attached to it that would run down to the bar, where the bartender would put in two bottles of beer. The DJ would then pull the string and have the beers run back up to the booth. I thought it was one of the most en genius things I had ever seen.

[Sidenote: many people have bucket lists that they make about things they want to do, see, or experience before they die. I put things on my bucket list as they happen to me, because many things you don't realize you wanted to have happen to you until they are happening to you. For example at the Saloon I got to hear Wiz Khalifa's single "Black & Yellow" in a bar in Pittsburgh. They love that song, they went apeshit for it. So now, I have that added to my bucket list.]

By now it was getting to be around 12:30 a.m. I had stuck to beer most of the night so I had a pretty good buzz going, Kaela was a little further gone. We wanted to try and find somewhere to eat (a recurring issue on this trip if you haven't figured it out by now). One of the friends Kaela had met was going to take us to get pizza, ut the girls still wanted to try and find hummus, I didn't really care for either option. After several trips back and forth across the street and a chance encounter with a guy dressed in a Sidney Crosby jersey, that was decidedly NOT Sidney Crosby despite Kaela's arguments to the contrary, we happened on a diner and decided this was the best place to eat.

Sidney Crosby

Someone wearing a Sidney Crosby, there is a difference

The diner's name I cannot remember but it had good food, and I was able to get eggs, toast, hashbrowns, and a large spicy sausage patty for a reasonable price. We enjoyed several short conversations with the people around us, but for the most part were left alone to eat.

Finally it was time to leave, and we got a cab back. Our driver was much nicer than our first one. He was from Ghana, and worked as a cabbie on the weekends to make some extra money. He was very tolerant of our obnoxious questions, and loud singing. He seemed to enjoy our company as much as we enjoyed his, and while he took care to charge us for our entire trip it was only like a dollar or two more than it had cost to get there, which makes me wonder what kind of half assed route the old guy took to get there.

We arrived safely back at the hotel and promptly went to sleep around 2 or 3 a.m. knowing we had to be up in five or six hours to begin the final day of the convention.

So that's part five. Two more to go or so, maybe I'll try and knock it out in one I don't know yet. As always leave your comments below. And sorry there weren't too many pictures in this one.