Reporting from Nashville!

Hey everyone! I just wanted to let you know that we are in Nashville and enjoying! Wow, what a place!

First off, the hotel. Oh, my. What a place! You just have to see it to believe it. Theophilus, I haven't yet ordered an ice cream sundae from room service, but I hope to before we leave. Um, that leaves either tonight or tomorrow night. It'd probably have to be tonight because tomorrow is the Grand Banquet, and we'll already be overfed, and have a long program, as always. (Unless I cut and run, which I just might.)

I have to tell you about some of the things we've done off-site. Of course, I've been enjoying seeing everyone here at the conference, but I sure am glad we took the time to do some fun things in Nashville!

On Saturday we took the city bus (yes, Bruce, the city bus has a stop right at the hotel and takes us to downtown!) and saw the Tennessee State Museum. It's a free museum, and when we first walked in we thought it was going to be well worth the admission price. ;-) But as we went through it, we saw that there is a ton of information there, and really found it to be a great untapped resource. There's a lot of info about the civil war and presidents from the South and the whole slave issue. It was very informative.

After that we went chasing a vegetarian restaurant that I'd found online, that's on the campus of Vanderbilt University. But it was closed for the summer. However, we found, by asking about that veg. restaurant, another place that served a lot of vegetarian food, and even had some specifically vegan meals on the menu, called Calypso Cafe. Yum, the food was good! We ordered the "beans and three" which I think was a take-off on the "meat and three" that you can find around here. (Not sure if that's a more general Southern thing or specific to Nashville.) A meat and three is meat plus three side dishes. Well, we had Cuban Black beans along with: cole slaw, corn muffins, mashed sweet potatoes, calalloo (mustard green dish)....um, two other things that I can't remember. It was all delicious. Oh, and we ordered iced tea and they asked if we wanted unsweetened or "fruit tea." It's got pineapple juice and another kind of juice in it. We had that and it was very interesting! I'd never heard of that. And when the bill came my jaw dropped. All that for $14 and change.

After that we went back into downtown and bummed around the touristy section of Broadway. We walked along the river, and then saw the back of B.B. Kings Blues Club. We went around front, and found that there was a concert going on--almost over. A band was playing the blues, and the singer was taking the microphone around and just handing it to people in the audience and saying, "sing the blues." And the amazing thing: it was great! Amazing! I guess everyone in Nashville is just oozing with talent.

We went back last night to B.B. Kings and took two parishioners with us. They were playing motown music, and one of the parishioners grew up in that era. He visibly just had a great time listening, and was singing along with every song. He got me and the other parishioner to come and dance with him, and I suspect it was all in order to be closer to the band. :-) It was really great.

On Sunday night we went to the Bluebird Cafe. I highly recommend that place! It was songwriters' night, and there was a lot of raw talent there, plus a guy who has written songs sung by Garth Brooks, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, and many others. Oh, good food at the Bluebird, too! The eggplant parmesan was delicious.

But the big hit of the week so far was yesterday's NashTrash tour. Oh, my, what a couple of comedians! You can click on the link in my previous post to see the video of their show, which is what it is, a show. They supposedly were showing us the sites, but I didn't want to look out the window for fear of missing their hilarious antics. They were finding something to mock about everyone's names (which is, I think, how they learned all of them) and I wondered what they were going to say about us. Well, we were wearing our tie-dyed shirts, and so we were the hippies! Okay, hippie couple, where are you from? Oh, Portland, OR! that's where all the hippies are. During the break, they came over and asked what we did in Portland OR. Paul had already said, I don't want to tell them I'm a priest, or I'll never hear the end of it! But he told them. Then he became the hippie priest from Oregon! And we're not going to clean it up just because a priest is on board! Heehee. It was very risque, wicked humor. And we loved every minute of it.

Anyway, that's it for now!