WUSIes

You know that Martha has taken you to an establishment where you are guaranteed to have fun when the stalls of the bathroom recommend only ‘ONE PERSON PER STALL.’ Indeed, we had a rollicking good time dancing at Splash on Friday night in NYC. We’ll leave the story at that.

The bartender at Cuba (mighty good restaurant in the Village) recommended we go to a hot club on the Upper East called Lavo. But we didn’t quite fit in with the scene there. And the clincher was when the bouncer told us we weren’t on the ‘guest list.’

Cuba was a damn good restaurant. But I’m not sure I would recommend getting the squid ink paella right before trying to get into the hottest club in town.

All endurance athletes know that refueling is key to recovery after a long night of partying. Okay, this shot is a fraud — it’s from the Original Pancake House in Bethesda several days earlier. There’s no way we were looking this fresh Saturday morning.

Just to make sure that the Italianos didn’t get bored, I set up a lunch with the famous sex blogger Max. He told us fun stories about how his girlfriend’s mom doesn’t like him on account of his lurid blogging about her daughter. We kind of thought the mom had a point. We also thought the mom should probably disconnect her computer for her future sanity. And just live in a box. For the rest of her life.

The Italianos had done brilliantly with all the curve balls I’d thrown, but to try to balance out the weekend with some normal, well-adjusted people, we met my Amherst XC teammate Helen Dole for a run in Central Park Sunday morning. Helen is the epitome of sunkissed happy normal, a nice antidote to totally f’ed up, in your face Max.
Alice and Isabella did a photo shoot around Central Park, mastering their glamor shots and Come Hither looks, while Helen and I went for a spin around the park (we ran right by Deena Kastor!).


Back in DC we got straight to work, building our phylogeographies of avian influenza virus in Turkey (H5N1) and Italy (H7N1), and of course hitting up Old Lady Aerobics (OLA) on Monday night.

With all this preparation the Italianos are totally ready to take on Tuesday night WUS. The question to the WUSsies is: Are you ready for them?
Martha wins the award for Best Guest(s) brought to a WUS event.
They went back to Padova today. I’m having Italiano withdrawal.
Me too.