Happy Easter!

One of those normal days in Cleveland, I did what I normally did which was wake up in the afternoon and stumble my way to the nearest form of caffeine.  Where we were staying in Cleveland, the fastest form of coffee was the Starbucks directly across the street.  It was one of those shops where it was in the lower level of an incredibly tall building, I want to say that it was about 50 stories or so.  I had been in Starbucks there more than a few times, but while I was standing there waiting for my quad shot IV drip to be made, I noticed that people kept coming in from the other side of the store.  Now, as I said, the coffee shop was in a huge building, so usually those are full of some corporation hell bent on living the corporate life style; cubicles, phone lines everywhere, customer service people - the normal hell.  I decided to wander towards the back and I didn't exactly see what I thought I'd see.  What I saw instead was what appeared, at first glance, to be a jungle. Now, I knew I didn't have my coffee in my system and before I could go explore, they called me over for my drink, but I saw someone else walk through the door and now I NEEDED to know what was going on in there.

What E and I saw every night looked like every other downtown.  Nothing fancy and in fact, quite a few times, we would grumble about how there wasn't anything truly interesting downtown to look at.

Example 1 - boring

Well, as I staggered back across the street to the apartment building, I had begun drinking my espresso and I was getting more intrigued by the moment.  I went upstairs and told E that she needed to get dressed because I needed to go check this out and 'No' wasn't the appropriate answer. We finished our coffee and made our way across the street, back into Starbucks, and I led her to the back and opened the door.  Inside, there were waterfalls, plants everywhere, fountains, small tables to lounge at... heaven in a concrete box.  It was amazing to find.  We decided that we would call it an Easter Egg building since you have no idea what is in the center.

Swearing up and down that this was the most unique building I had ever been in, we decided to start taking pictures.  This lasted about 10 minutes before a security guard came over and asked if we had permission from the building owner.  We told him honestly that we had no idea who to ask as we had never been in there before and the guard let us know the owner wasn't there.  We snapped off 2 more pictures and made a break for it.  What I thought was unique, however, turned out to be almost anything but.

Cleveland is full of Easter Egg buildings down town.  You look at the outside facade and all you see is windows and cement, but go into the main lobby and you think that you went into some twilight zone of goodness.  We would wander around and just pop into buildings to see what was on the inside of this one or that one.  Now, at this point, I could say that this is how a lot of people are - judge a book by it's cover and all that, but, I for one, am not a humanitarian by nature.  I am more likely to run someone over like a squirrel than sit there and wax philosophically about someone's spirit or soul or purity.  So if you read that into my statements, I hope you wander in front of me in traffic.  I was talking about a building.

Anyways.  If you ever find yourself in Cleveland, go check it out.  It's highly entertaining to park your car, wander into a building and look for the fountain of youth.  Bring your camera, the security guards love chasing people, I swear.