Albuquerque

When I arrived in Albuquerque, NM. my host was at a David Sedaris reading, so I went to the downtown area to get some dinner. I went to this noodle restaurant that was pretty good and walked around the downtown. A couple things were a little odd to me about downtown Albuquerque. For one, in the center of the downtown was a strip club. Secondly, as I walked around I started seeing people dressed like they were going to Prom or some kind of a Cinderella Ball. Women were in gowns and men were in suits and tuxes. The people were too old to be in high school though, so it wasn't Prom. The third thing that struck me was that a bunch of the streets were being blocked off. I figured there must be some big event going on downtown.

I met up with my host around 10pm at her house and told her about what I saw downtown, the gowns, and street blockades. She said that happens every weekend. Get this... the people get SO drunk down there that they stumble into the streets and get hit by cars. To prevent this, the city blockades the downtown roads near all the bars. The people that were all dressed up, they do that every weekend. It's just something people do.

After I met up with my host, she went out to dinner with a friend so I went back downtown to look around a little bit longer. I then returned, talked to my host for about an hour and then went to bed because it was rather late and I was tired.

The next morning I got a recommendation for a great place to get a breakfast burrito. It was at a restaurant called Frontier. I had the breakfast burrito and it comes with green chile. It was very good. Afterwards I had about an hour to kill before I had to hit the road so I went back downtown to take some photos. Below are some of the things I took pictures of.