Every time I touch down in CLE, I spend a week surrounded by people who love me. Okay, of course, going home to visit family and friends is nice. Dear Future Dan (one of the main readers of this blog): remember this week, it was really great!

Dear all the other readers of this blog: you are probably less interested in my reminiscing about family-and-friends-time. So instead, I’ll point out some great things about Cleveland that you might get a chance to experience someday if you’re lucky enough to visit here:

- theater at the Hanna, where my parents and I saw Two Gentlemen of Verona, and despite the play being generally not an awesome Shakespeare play, the performance was really well done!

- dinner at Lola, where now-famous chef Michael Symon got his start (I think?). Anyway, calf heart: surprisingly not weird, and surprisingly good. And pork belly too. Wow. (vegetarians beware.)

- drinks at the Velvet Tango Room, okay this place was kinda underwhelming when I live so close to Sun Liquor, Tavern Law, and Zig Zag, but it’s at least in the same league, albeit more expensive.

- whoops forgot a drink in the middle at the Paganfest promotional show at Maple Grove in Maple Heights. Sometimes these things happen. Cleveland!

- 30+ kinds of olive oil and balsamic vinegar at the Olive Scene, and lunch at Tartine, in Rocky River. Check out the Olive Scene. Disclaimer: friends' parents own it. But it’s great.

- another great lunch, this time at some bar I don’t remember but it was on TV or something, I don’t know these things it was tasty

- still got to stop at the West Side Market, which is still also wonderful.

I mean, this is right out of an airplane magazine “36 hours in Cleveland” deal. There is a lot going on there. I think I will not dump on Cleveland so much. It’s got a lot of issues (cars cars cars) but it also has a lot to offer. I like to think about the latter. (more on that later!)

EDIT: whoops, I guess I didn’t click Publish when I wrote this? So I published it later. Editing the date now to fit it back within the squiggly-wiggly timey-wimey continuum. (btw, new Who season: super great!)