By VERONICA REARDON Your Weekend Columnist
This past weekend my off-campus activities were surprisingly minimal considering how many days were at my disposal. To be fair the first week of school can be pretty exhausting, and overcoming the gravity of campus can take some energy.
Still, I was able to make it to an Old Time jam at Liam Flynn’s, a bar in Station North last Tuesday night. For anyone who’s interested, there are old time and bluegrass jams at Liam Flynn’s every week for all levels of musicians. You can check out pintsizepub.com to see their calendar and plan your visit around the type of music that appeals to you. If you play an instrument and want to connect with other Baltimore musicians, I’d suggest it! Even if you just want to have a couple beers and listen to live bluegrass with no cover charge, it’s worth going if you have the time and inclination on a weeknight.
My less glamorous off-campus weekend activities included helping my roommate carry an air conditioner through Waverly on Saturday from Ace Hardware back to our apartment. There’s a cat that lives at Ace so that was nice, and the citizens of Waverly had a lot of advice and encouragement to offer about carrying an air conditioner, which was (generally) charming.
Probably the largest amount of time I spent off campus was on Sunday when my roommates and a friend of ours went to Korean barbecue. Some of us were planning on seeing JHU Film Society’s screening of Pink Flamingos (a controversial film directed, written and produced by Baltimore’s John Waters) afterward, banking on our strong stomachs and the barf bags the Film Society promised to hand out to get us through the film. Having missed the Blue Jay Shuttle by a neat two minutes, we walked to the restaurant, which is in Station North. I’ve been to two Korean restaurants in the area: Nak Won and the one we visited this week, BeOne.
BeOne is in a strip mall not far from Nak Won. The inside was more modern-looking and cleaner than Nak Won, more brightly lit as well. It wasn’t necessarily better, but it had a very different vibe.
“I thought you guys would like this better since it looks nicer,” Jisoo, one of my roommates who’d brought us here, said. “Also, I heard Nak Won has been charging drunk people extra on their credit cards.”
We all agreed that we were glad to avoid that fate.
The food was beautiful if you like meat. If you’ve never been to Korean barbecue before (I hadn’t), one of its key charms is that the servers place the food on a circular grill in front of you and you finish cooking it yourself. There are all kinds of sides — lettuce to wrap the meat in, rice if you want it — and we bought some rice wine to accompany our meal. Afterward there was general talk of dessert that eventually resolved into agreement that yes, definitely, we would share a dessert.
Dessert was red beans on shaved ice. It was almost, but not entirely, quite unlike ice cream. It was also beautiful. We caught a Blue Jay shuttle back just in time for Pink Flamingos afterward.
Pink Flamingos was exactly what I expected. Maybe the dialogue and some of the acting was a little worse than I thought it would be. Watching a movie on film was pretty cool. The barf bags turned out to be unnecessary, although one of my friends did say “Oh god” quite a few times.
