Zócalo, Philadelphia

Thursday 12 April
After Holt's lecture the entire audience (all six of us)* went out to eat courtesy of the Penn Linguistics Dept. (Thanks, Don!) at a nice Mexican restaurant near campus, Zócalo. We had a tart classic margarita and a surprisingly tasty ginger margarita to start with. For appetizers; sikil-pak, an addictive Mayan pumpkin seed dip, a pimenton-laced chorizo with corn and onions (the sausage came in curls, rather like slices off a gyro), and a plate of calamari. Holt and Barbara split a tilapia Veracruzana (tomatoes, green olives, capers), and a not-too-bitter chicken mole (the italics are important here - a Mexican chocolate sauce, not a small burrowing insectivorous mammal of the subfamily Talpinae). Then at the nice waitress's urging we had a lime empanada for dessert.

It occurs to us now to explain, as I don't think that we have before, that on our first time dining out, one of us said, "I'm torn between the X and the Y," while the other said, "I'm torn between the Y and X." We swapped plates half way through. Marriage inevitably followed and that has remained our custom and our delight.

*There might have been more had Holt forborne to specify in his lecture title that by Lesbian he meant the ancient Greek dialect.