Yesterday…

All my troubles seemed so far away…

Just kidding. Life is not so forlorn as that song; it’s just in my head because at the weekly marriage enrichment class which we’ve been going to at the chapel and we just got back from, the teacher couple plays music during thinking or discussing times and today they played that song.

Anyway.

The point is, yesterday was a good day–for a lot of reasons, but the thing we’re going to blog about is our trip downtown. For some reason, this weekend we’ve been particularly Richmondy, meaning that we’ve actually gone out and done stuff that only happens in Richmond: Friday it was the Greek festival, and yesterday was the Byrd Theater in Carytown.

The Byrd Theater is kind of a mix between Movies 8 in Provo and Capitol Theater in Salt Lake. It’s like Movies 8 in that it’s basically Richmond’s dollar theater–or rather, 2-dollar theater–and it’s like Capitol Theater in that it’s all fancy schmancy old-fashioned inside, with the ornate carvings or paintings or whatever, the red curtains, the balcony, the whole nine yards. The outside admittedly doesn’t look that impressive, but it’s definitely got the cool oldschool feel inside.

And the shows? I think they have some cultural events going on like piano music, but yesterday we got the 4:30 showing of Night at the Museum 2. By the time the show started, the place was teeming with kids and their parents; I think I saw only one other couple like ourselves (although I’m sure if we were at BYU, the place would be teeming with couples instead of kids). It was fun hearing the whole place erupt with kid laughter at the cheesy funny parts like monkeys slapping each other.

Afterwards we walked around on famous Cary Street for a bit (probably not more than a couple hundred yards, actually), stopping at the “Bygones” store of antique clothing and trying on some of their outlandishly expensive but schnazzy hats.

Then we ate at a little Mexican restaurant on the other side of the street. I got mole poblano, which I got Jacob to try and he actually liked it this time! (Back story: I loved eating mole at members’ houses on my mission and talked it up a lot with Jacob, so one day we bought canned mole and had it on some chicken, but unfortunately it was pretty disappointing aka disgusting.) For those of you who don’t know what mole is, it’s a sauce that goes on chicken mostly and is made of many things, one of which is chocolate. However, I did learn something from the guy at the restaurant yesterday: there is another variety of mole that actually doesn’t have chocolate in it, mole ranchero. I always thought of mole as just mole, the one-kind chocolate sauce. Now I know there’s mole poblano and mole ranchero. Just in case you were wondering.