Thursday, December 16, 2004
Better Days
Rochester on a Wednesday night is -3 degrees Celcius (or 30 degrees Fahrenheit), dark and economically depressed. Flew in on an American Eagle flight, so small there's no room to bring your roll-on travel bag on board, seats so restricted you only have room to tear open the bag of Cheddar mix snack gently, aisle so narrow that if your ego swelled a little for knowing that you lived in a better city, you'd get stuck.
Driving through the town, you see Pizza Huts that haven't been remodelled since the 1980s, restaurant names that don't sound right (Al's Green Pizzeria) and enough boarded up storefronts so that you wonder how much commerce really sees light of day. There are three big corporate giants here -- Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Bird's Eye. The town moves along perhaps like a product off of one of the plants' assembly line conveyor belts -- with the business, slowly, no final destination really, but at least it's in motion.
The waitress at Don Pablo's Mexican Restaurant, next to our Courtyard by Marriott, next to the Interstate, asks where we're from. Chicago, we said. "Chicago," she replied. "Chicago."
"What are you folks doing in Rochester if you're from Chicago?"
Driving through the town, you see Pizza Huts that haven't been remodelled since the 1980s, restaurant names that don't sound right (Al's Green Pizzeria) and enough boarded up storefronts so that you wonder how much commerce really sees light of day. There are three big corporate giants here -- Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Bird's Eye. The town moves along perhaps like a product off of one of the plants' assembly line conveyor belts -- with the business, slowly, no final destination really, but at least it's in motion.
The waitress at Don Pablo's Mexican Restaurant, next to our Courtyard by Marriott, next to the Interstate, asks where we're from. Chicago, we said. "Chicago," she replied. "Chicago."
"What are you folks doing in Rochester if you're from Chicago?"
// posted by Desiree @ 11:42 PM 
