New Year's Eve: Good Friends, Mediocre Food, and a Sobering Movie
We spent New Year’s Eve with our friends L & M, as we have for many years. This year Dan was with us. Rachel was clubbing in NYC with school friends.
Our evening started off at Bangkok 54, a new upscale Thai restaurant in Arlington. They had gone to a lot of effort to make it look like western New Years! There was a band playing what sounded like Vietnamese music; we could have done without the music. The food was plentiful and flavorful, but definitely missing the spiciness that makes your mouth burn as you reach for another bite. Panang curry demands to be spicy to be authentic. Maybe next time we need to be explicit that we are not western spice wimps and we want it HOT!
We came back to our house and decided to watch a NetFlix movie: Maria, Full of Grace, at L’s request. Maria is a Colombian girl who finds herself pregnant and quits her flower industry job to become a drug mule. This involves swallowing as many as 70 wrapped pellets of cocaine / heroine and then getting on a plane bound for New York. One danger, among many, is the chance that one of the pellets comes unwrapped in your stomach resulting in a grueling death. Maria almost gets snagged by customs, but evades an X-ray because she is pregnant. Another girl, Lucy, feels ill from the minute she gets on the plane and eventually dies in New York. The story deals with Maria’s dilemma of what to do in this big new world, as she carries around 62 pellets of heroine and tries to survive. She eventually contacts the drug guys who more than willingly take the heroine off her hands and then wisely elects to quit her new job and stay in New York.
This was just a story, but it too clearly depicts a situation that is quite real. Young girls are promised more money than they have ever seen to do a disgusting and dangerous job. They are just pawns for the drug lords. What can society do about this in the face of a hungry market for these drugs?
As the movie ended, the ball on Time Square began to drop. We held up glasses of bad Prosecco and toasted in 2005 as we kissed and hugged each other. The good news was that there would be no hangovers in the morning because the wine had been so bad that no one drank it. Mark it down that I didn’t sleep through the movie (as L did) and I stayed up past midnight – it doesn’t happen often.
Our evening started off at Bangkok 54, a new upscale Thai restaurant in Arlington. They had gone to a lot of effort to make it look like western New Years! There was a band playing what sounded like Vietnamese music; we could have done without the music. The food was plentiful and flavorful, but definitely missing the spiciness that makes your mouth burn as you reach for another bite. Panang curry demands to be spicy to be authentic. Maybe next time we need to be explicit that we are not western spice wimps and we want it HOT!
We came back to our house and decided to watch a NetFlix movie: Maria, Full of Grace, at L’s request. Maria is a Colombian girl who finds herself pregnant and quits her flower industry job to become a drug mule. This involves swallowing as many as 70 wrapped pellets of cocaine / heroine and then getting on a plane bound for New York. One danger, among many, is the chance that one of the pellets comes unwrapped in your stomach resulting in a grueling death. Maria almost gets snagged by customs, but evades an X-ray because she is pregnant. Another girl, Lucy, feels ill from the minute she gets on the plane and eventually dies in New York. The story deals with Maria’s dilemma of what to do in this big new world, as she carries around 62 pellets of heroine and tries to survive. She eventually contacts the drug guys who more than willingly take the heroine off her hands and then wisely elects to quit her new job and stay in New York.
This was just a story, but it too clearly depicts a situation that is quite real. Young girls are promised more money than they have ever seen to do a disgusting and dangerous job. They are just pawns for the drug lords. What can society do about this in the face of a hungry market for these drugs?
As the movie ended, the ball on Time Square began to drop. We held up glasses of bad Prosecco and toasted in 2005 as we kissed and hugged each other. The good news was that there would be no hangovers in the morning because the wine had been so bad that no one drank it. Mark it down that I didn’t sleep through the movie (as L did) and I stayed up past midnight – it doesn’t happen often.
posted by Barbara at 10:09 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home