Free Soup

This weekend is the 61st Winterskol Celebration here in Aspen.  It's an annual Winter Festival we have that features various events throughout town.  Last evening was Soupskol.  This is where they block off two streets downtown, set up 30 stalls for restaurants and retailers to serve from and, well, its Free Soup for all.  I helped our Chef again at this years event.  So that means I basically stood there in the freezing cold, ladling out 25 gallons of soup, 2 ounces at a time, for 2 hours.  Its all good though.  It was quite fun with everybody in good spirits (wouldn't you be with free soup for dinner).  And the soups are quite tasty as this is essentially advertising for the participants in the event - they want to make sure they have some quality product.

don't eat meat

We served a Ham Tomatillo soup, which I labeled as Porkalicious.  Pretty good stuff.  Anyway, today I was talking to a customer at the store about the event last night and we were going on about how nice it was and all ... and then as if on que, she whispered at the end of our conversation 'I won't tell anybody you were serving a soup with meat in it'.  Sigggh.  As I mentioned just a couple of posts ago, people just assume you're a vegetarian if they think of you as healthy (at least this certainly happens to me often enough).  I just politely told her I eat plenty of meat and left it at that.

People get pretty creative with the white stuff

Not an hour later I was walking around town checking out the snow sculptures and ran into another customer from the store.  His first question was 'Are you still running a lot?'  Now, I don't know this guy.  I see him at the store occasionally and he has obviously seen me running around town in years past.  So I told him that, no, actually, I don't run anymore... I do sprints instead.  And that in fact I had just done some this very morning.  He was all ears and at the end of our brief encounter he stated:  'I'm pumped up, I'm going to do some sprints'. 

One more funny tidbid.  I was having lunch down in the break room yesterday and one of the big honcho's from the store came in to join us (never seen him down there before).  And guess what?  He had an avocado, sardines, and some nuts.  Want to take a stab at what I was having for lunch?  He had no doubt seen me grabbing my lunch and was inspired to try it.  This is not the first time this has happened to me either.

There are fireworks on the mountain tonight

I suppose the take home message here is that people take notice if they think you're healthy and wonder what it is that you do.  Sometimes they have preconceived notions of healthy (vegetarian, cardio running, etc) and sometimes you surprise them.  Now, I'm not even going to get into the whole train of though on how it's a bad idea to just emulate people you think are healthy (especially professional athletes by the way) and just leave you with an idea:  Lead by example.  People are indeed watching.