Adult skating

This past weekend, I journeyed to Iowa City, IA to watch my friend Mary skate in the 2010 Midwest & Pacific Synchronized Team Skating Sectional Championships! To be fair, we were also there to hang out with Sarah's friends from home. (Sarah is from Iowa.) We drove over Friday and hung out the pool for a while where we met two guys who were super into wrestling. One of them had no neck (or maybe too much neck?) to the point where he looked like Bruce the Shark from Finding Nemo. He also had a lot of weird tattoos.

After sushi and sake bombs at the restaurant in the lobby of the hotel for dinner, we went out to a few places and ended up at Joe's Place, which is apparently famous for "egg bombs." Sarah's friend Austin INSISTED we do them, so we did. In case the name isn't clear, an egg bomb is a glass of pbr with a pickled egg at the bottom. So you chug the beer, which gets really vinegary towards the bottom, and then you put the entire egg in your mouth and eat it.

I finished the beer first (because I'm awesome), but I rarely eat even hard boiled eggs sober, much less whole and pickled, so I finished that part last (because I'm a pussy). I had to close my eyes and envision myself at a lovely brunch, eating deviled eggs. It was pretty bad. Eh, I'm now richer for the experience (cue Stewie's voice here).

The skating was precious, even though it was adult ladies skating. (Sidebar: the term "adult skating", which it is actually called, makes me think of both the porn industry AND adult diapers. What an odd dichotomy.) Sometimes the skaters look beautiful and graceful like this:

but apparently they can also look like this:

We didn't see anyone like that, but the spectators were often pretty frightening. It was like People of Walmart and US Figure Skating had a baby. I saw a fan wearing the crazy clown makeup the skaters have to wear (teal and silver glitter) with a tiara and normal people clothes. It was...unforch.

Mary, on the other hand, looked like an angel from the heavens, not unlike one Johnny Weir. I may have gushed "Oh em gee Mary looks BEAUTIFUL" when I first saw her on the ice. And maybe cried a little bit. NO BIG DEAL. The grocery store that we stopped at on the way didn't have a flower section (it was in Cedar Rapids), so we got her a Toblerone bar that had a rose on it. It's like she's in the Olympics!