Around Denver's best hood: Capitol Hill

Many travelers go through Denver with perhaps missing the most iconic and interesting neighborhood that it has to offer. Whereas you do have the scenically beautiful 16th Street Mall, lined with skyscrapers and patrolled by a free shuttle up and down its length, anyone is quickly rewarded with extending their trip into the Capitol Hill neighborhood, aptly named for being up the hill and behind the Capitol building.

the ever eclectic architecture of Capital Hill

When I first came to Denver to search for apartments, I stayed at the infamous Ramada on Colfax. Colfax runs on the northern edge of the neighborhood, a street which in my book How It Ends, I describe as “a dirty street, a magical street. Here the degenerates of Denver gather, huddled in circles, having cigarettes and joints and crack pipes and passing the whiskey and rum. Youths hang around concert halls… Gas stations mixed with hotels and bars and night clubs, poster shops and record stores.”

Colfax at night

It’s definitely the main avenue of Denver, though perhaps best avoided at most times. It’s generally a much better idea to walk down 16th or 14th on either side, then move up to the bar you’re going to. That said, the Ramada is a plenty safe place to stay. The entrance looks like a curiously out-of-place hunting lodge and the pool is a popular spot for locals to jump the fence and take the plunge.

even castles(?!) adorn the streets of Cap Hill

Capitol Hill is an eclectic mix of everything in every way. Mostly, there are plots after plots of small apartment complexes and large houses, ranging in styles from Victorian, to Second Empire, to fairy tale castle revival that would make Ludwig II wet his grave. Occasionally the neighborhood is broken up by an inexplicable almost Khrushobki tower or a brutalist office building. The people are equally diverse, from young ladies in yoga pants with yoga mats, to bearded lumbersexual hipsters, to funky hip-hop bandits, to tie-dye flowing hippies, to a large mix of bums and beggars attracted to the soup kitchens and homeless shelters that dot the area.

Drink

There are no shortages of bars in the neighborhood, especially along the main avenues of Colfax and 13th. We trolled some lesbian bar called Blush and Blu (Colfax and Humboldt) the other night, listening to a fairly awesome band reminiscent of the soul and groove of the older days of the Roots. As there was a mix of people there, I wasn’t so sure my hosts were correct, though it did seem to be run by a fairly friendly lady that certainly met the stereotype. Anyways, it's apparently a nice venue for both sides of the door.

a straight-friendly bar

There’s the hippie standout, Sancho’s Broken Arrow (Colfax and Clarkson), where a long time ago, I’ve spent a few regrettable nights playing pool and staring at the Grateful Dead art lining the walls. The best place for a Guinness will always be the Irish Snug (Colfax and Marion), a two-roomed joint of polished wood with an expansive underground and frequent live music, next to the Polish bar Kinga’s (Colfax and Marion) stocked with good sausage and great karaoke. A lot of the old staples though have been swapped out for the ever-present modernist factory chic brewbar, or like the once amazing and always packed Benders, fallen to the likes of the followers of Garcia. Long live the Johnny Cash mural painted over by the vandal deadhead who changed him out for his evil master.

Eat

During my travels through Croatia in Stari Grad, I learned to love lavender. I found that it’s not just a wonderful smell, but it’s also a delightfully tasteful herb, making everything it touches tasting as plush and sweet as velvet. When I wandered into Jelly (13th and Penn), I found lavender blueberry pancakes on the menu and couldn’t resist. The sweet delight and extensive menu of weird and experimental variations on regular foods, like a Thai peanut donut, did much to explain why there were people waiting around the door even on a Thursday morning. Or, on second thought, perhaps it didn’t explain anything but that really bizarre flavors are in fashion in Denver at the moment. But either way, I can’t imagine the masses that gather around on the weekend, especially for the ever-popular American tradition of the Sunday brunch.

get your lavender pancakes on at Jelly

For sandwiches, there’s also Subculture (13th and Penn), but an even better thing would be to furnish your taste buds with some down south cooking at Sassafras (Colfax and Logan). The place that was there used to be as dirty and hopeless as the location would lead you to consider it to be, but someone managed to spruce it up and successfully decorate it in the theme of Louisiana. The meat dumplings are served with an amazing spicy sauce, the coffee and service all fresh, and the cheesy muffin and sausage is without an end of savory-ness. though I did find the chicken and sausage in the gumbo were a bit dry and lacking. Well, not at all like my momma's, but isn't that always the case and danger with down home cooking?

Some Cajun cookin' on the plateau

Of course, every late night in the neighborhood must be finished by either gigantic pancakes and milkshakes at Tom’s Diner (Colfax and Pearl), or a huge slab of fresh New York style pizza that’s better than anything in New York from Benny Blanco's (13th and Pearl).

Coffee

It’s impossible to walk far in Denver without running into a coffeeshop, and that’s especially true in Capitol Hill. When I left years ago, the place that was quickly becoming a destination coffee joint was Pablo’s (13th and Penn), a satellite of their main café down on 6th street. It serves as an amazing place for a quick brew or a longer linger, and its roasted beans cover many other restaurants throughout town, including the aforementioned Jelly.

for the best coffee in Denver

#Denver #bars #restaurants

With a hot cup of mulled wine

5 things to do stuck at an airport, or on loneliness and traveling

I’m back to making a large trip, though due to unfortunate timing and work schedules, this time without my beloved wife. One of my best friends had planned his wedding for just about the busiest time of the year for my wife, and sadly he won’t have his life revolve around ours. So it means that I’m writing this blog now sitting alone at the terminal at O’Hare.

regular facial expression without the wife

And after traveling so long with someone, it’s such an empty and lonely feeling traveling alone. Don’t get me wrong, traveling before I had got married was also lonely, and all these little feel-good books claiming that it isn’t are filled with lies.

There are different kinds of lonelinesses though, some can be positive, leading you along weird and exciting paths, and of course, some can be negative. Some can be the feeling of when you don’t have half of yourself present, that it’s just a ghost-limb operation of half of your body and soul and even when traveling is one of the more exciting prospects in your life, you want to be back at home and in bed with your loved one. Obviously, I’m not speaking about you, but rather about me.

waiting at the terminal

So finally, my readers are again subjected to one of my travels without my wife, not that I’m so prone to talk about personal things, but still.

Layovers are probably the most painful thing for me about air travel. You have to spend hours and hours stuck at a place with no purpose but idleness, a panopticon you're forced into, unable at all to leave without endless more hassle. Surrender comes. As it’s a prison, the best habits then are from prisoners.

Chicago O’Hare offers 30 minutes of free wifi per device. With my phone and tablet, that gave me an hour to kill on Facebook, reading the news, and listless swiping on social media. When that died, my next mission was to walk the complete length of the concourse, but very slowly. I mean at such a speed that it’s deliberate. I’ve read that prisoners in the gulag and elsewhere become masters of this sort of walking, since that was the only real entertainment they were given for years at a time. The gulag stroll.

not quite boarding

And luckily I found a bookstore. They’re not always around, and they don’t always have good things in them. But you can at least browse all those books you weren’t planning on buying but your friends told you to check out so you could “check your privilege” or whatever. That means scanning through any book with a Ta-nehisi Coates quote on the cover, or anything that said “feminist” or “feminism”. Just a brief browsing though, don’t want to waste too much time wasting time, because maybe there is a diamond in that rough of pencil scratchings.

We’ve been hosting an old friend and blogger, Terra, from a Spork in the Road–check it out, the blog is packed with a lot of great cooking tips. It’s her first time really and truly abroad and it’s been making me remember all those random things I’ve taken for granted. All those things that seem easy and done without thought today were, at some point in my life, quite difficult and stressful ordeals. It’s true that taking up the traveling life is not a necessarily easy thing.

There are lots of things out there written about traveling, and a lot of it is rubbish and nonsense and most of it is clickbait. I’ve hit this topic over again, partly covered in the trend I’ve discussed that I call “disaster porn”, when travelers or pretenders write about how awful and terrifying certain situations are, highlighting only all of the bad aspects, when it’s really simply not that bad. They want to do this to drive traffic maybe, or maybe just make themselves appear all that much more suave and heroic of people themselves.

I used to obsess about pickpockets over here. I had a cash belt that I was always carrying around, and I used to make sure that I kept portions of my cash in each of my socks, in the belt, and—I learned this one after some time—accessible so I could actually use it.

After never actually losing money to thieves but only losing it to sweaty balls and laundry runs, I realized that maybe a lot of the things I had assumed I should be paranoid about maybe I shouldn’t. I’m not saying to develop a complete aloofness—always maintain some situational awareness—but at the end of the day, if you’re something of a budget traveler and aren’t flashy, all likelihood is that you’re probably not going to be someone’s first choice target and you’ll get along alright.

For money, best advice is to always have some spending cash on you that’s easily accessible, in your front pocket, and in small denominations—lots of places around the globe tend to have chronic problems breaking any bill worth more than 50 dollars.

It’s hard first-time traveling. I’ll admit it. I was once a first timer. And the best thing that happened to me in introducing me to this life was my time in Peace Corps. Peace Corps holds your hand at the very beginning, does everything for you, and then slowly disengages you at almost your own pace. Then afterwards, you’re quite prepared to take the big dive into the real world, apart from Peace Corps, handling everything from foreign medical insurance, to taxes, to setting up shop and finding a job wherever you roam. And it is a skill you have to study and work at, to observe.

But the biggest skill I’ve found is abject humility. You have to accept help from others, you have to back down and understand that maybe you don’t know anything about life outside your comfort zone, outside the United States or Monrovia or wherever you've come from. That was my biggest struggle, and I think that’s everyone’s biggest struggle. The older you get, the harder it is to surrender, to ask for and receive help, and to be grateful and gracious. But just because it’s harder, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It’s always been one of my struggles, and it’s a struggle that I hope I’ve had some success with.

It might seem counterintuitive when traveling to unknown lands. But the biggest help is to trust in strangers. Understand not everyone is a thief, not everyone is out to dish you a piece of disaster porn. In fact, most people, deep down inside, wherever you are, are decent people. Maybe they’re not that good, or that bad, maybe they’re just busy and caught up in their own lives, but that doesn’t make them any less decent, and most strangers will aid each other at least in little ways, and a collection of little helpings equals one big one.

When I was walking away from the electronic customs computers at the airport, an old lady called out to me. “What am I doing here? I’ve never seen this.” I came back over. “Me too, it’s new to me, but let me help you.” And when you rely on the decency of others, it starts to transform you, hopefully into a more decent person yourself. And by all these “yous”, I mean, of course, me.

#rantsandraves #traveltips