lunch, an excuse to go outdoors

You begin to need reasons to leave the apartment. Yesterday, lunch was it. We had a meeting scheduled and it was up to us to choose the location, so the Au Bon Pain at Harvard Sq. seemed to be an appropriate choice. Ever since our first night in Cambridge, this hulking cafe has been a landmark etched into our heads and butchered by our tongues. "Oh yeah, the uh-buh-pah, it's right next to the Harvard T-stop."

We set out for the cafe a good 10 minutes earlier than we probably needed to (but better early than late for these sorts of things, right?). This was a pretty tame "fall" day in Cambridge, mind you, so it was cold and only lightly raining. I hesitate to even call it "fall," given that I have seen little evidence to show that this region of the U.S. even experiences what we in the Mid-Atlantic would refer to as "fall" (or autumn, in some circles). It seemed like over the course of a week, the weather went from sweltering to frigid and dreary. This, I was later told, was the transition from summer to winter.

But back to lunch, one crucial mistake was that we had no idea who to look for, nor had we given him any description of what we looked like. We were just the two awkward guys standing outside in the drizzle. There are only so many ways to play off this all-too-typical exchange:

"Hey, we're Steve and Alexis from reddit."

*pause*

"Reddit? What? Who are you? What do you want from me?"

We did eventually find who we were looking for and we even got treated to lunch. It’s nice to get a meal every now and then that hasn’t already been pre-prepared-cooked-and-packaged.

You might be startup-founder if you consider adding milk to cereal an act of “food preparation.” Many don’t even put in that much effort.