Der Blind Cow

Had a pretty crazy experience last week eating at a restaurant run by visually impaired people called "The Blind Cow". They walk you into this room and serve you a meal COMPLETELY in the dark. We are talking no phones, pagers, watches that light up anything that will cast light inside. (Yeah like that one CSI episode). You check out the menu OR choose to be "surprised". You walk inside (12 of us went!) as a long train of people, hands on shoulders, and are seated. It was such a bizarre feeling, groping around for simple things like the remnant of your bottle of coke without knocking anything over.

But by far the most FASCINATING part of the night was after the plates were cleared. We noticed that for the first time all night we could see something. "No you can't". "YES I CAN!" We noticed a faint but very real phosphorescent glow on the place mats. If you picked it up and blew on it, the heat from your breath would make it glow yellow, like mashed lighting bugs. We started hypothesizing about what this could be. It's just like the sea creatures at the very bottom of the ocean who 'see' by the phosphorescent algae or whatever. We finally deduced that it was likely a detergent that these were washed in that contained phosphates. We asked the waiter when he returned and he confirmed this reality and said it was a big problem that they hadn't solved yet, not something they did on purpose. It made us all wonder how much other stuff we wash glows but we never know it because we aren't in a pitch black room long enough. AMAZING!

It was a very very fun and interesting night.

Overheard:

Ken: "Jack?! You stole my beer!"

Jack: "Yeah, I did."

"It's a good place to take a blind date"

"I bet they didn't spend much on interior decorators"

"I wonder if my pupils are still huge, or if they have just given up".

"Normally when I eat with my eyes close, I miss my mouth, but here I seem to have had no problem hitting it."

"Process High Five!" (Process High Fives are "whiff's for those of you not familiar. They are easy to execute in dark restaurants).

"I use my finger as a level indicator" I say when pouring my self a drink.

"I just use my load cells" Tami says, (in the engineering world, load cells are weighing devices, in this case her arm and brain.)

"It doesn't really matter who we sit by, you can't see anything…"

"Yeah, but our sense of smell still works…"

"The waiter just accidentally felt me up"

"I can't believe she said 'accidentally'" Says Ken.