Octopi, Coffee Houses and Emily Dickinson

Now that the first quarter of the school year has ended, I am now officially 5/8 of the way to being half way done with high school.  How time flies.

To celebrate my father's recent chronological advancement and the long weekend, we decided to go to Philadelphia for a couple of days.  I'm sitting in the hotel waiting for my parents to come back with coffee, and writing this on my dad's laptop, which just autocorrected my incorrect spelling of Philadelphia to 'pedophilia.'  Should I be concerned, Apple?

Anyway, I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you about my adventures here in Pedophilia thus far.

Upon arrival, we went to a place called Reading (pronounced Red-ing) Terminal Market, which was basically too many restaurants in too little floor space.  But it smelled excellent nonetheless.  We wandered around looking for unusual things (we found chocolate shaped like various internal organs and fried octopus) and then we came across a little non sequitur used bookstore in the corner.  The shelves were in the shape of a sideways E, and a sign in the middle of the "fiction" shelf informed us "Clerk Sometimes Here; Ring Bell." They had everything from Walt Whitman's collected works to manuals on how to read your dog's mind to a little old lady who looked and spoke exactly like Mrs. Costanza from Seinfeld.  When a man pulled The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo off the shelf she told him "That was an unpleasant book.  I didn't care for it. Might I suggest Nora Roberts instead?"

Sometimes I think the universe wants me to think I live in a sitcom.

Anyway, after a delicious lunch at a quaint little Amish diner, we headed out to an independent bookstore my dad had heard about.  Thankfully, this one was much less creepy than it's predecessor.  The smell of ink and paper filled the little room, and there wasn't an inch of space to spare.  Yet somehow it worked.  I could have spent hours just wandering through the shelves, but to sum it up, I bought The Catcher in the Rye and a book of Emily Dickinson poems, both of which I've been wanting to read.  After that we went to a little hipster coffee house, with strange paintings on the wall, table tops that looked like faberge eggs, and no menu whatsoever.  In other words, a coffee snob's paradise. 

I sat at a table in the corner with a foamy mug of coffee my dad had to order for me (I'm not quite up to his level of coffee snobbery, but I'm getting there) reading my Emily Dickinson poems and feeling an interesting mixture of cultured and content. 

Before I venture out again into my newfound hipster paradise, I'll leave you with an Emily Dickinson quote:

The bee doth court the flower, the flower his suit receives,
And they make marry wedding, whose guests are a hundred leaves,
The wind doth woo the branches, the branches they are won,
And the father fond demandeth the maiden for his son