It's Hip To Be Square

Hi

Hows it goin?

Hope all is cool where ever you happened to be in the world.

A momentous thing happened in aberdeen a couple of weeks ago, a new shopping centre opened!

Union Square.

Its taken them about a decade to build and I can see why.

It's very swish.

It's got over 60 shops (some of which I have never heard of) a load of restaurants a hotel and a cinema. As well as being attached to the bus & train stations.

This is Aberdeen's attempts to become a better town for shopping than Glasgow. And for the most part it seems to be doing the trick. I went down the first weekend it was open and the place was HEAVING! Now thats to be expected, first of all it's a saturday and it's a new centre, but this was ridiculously busy.

As I said the new place is very swish, but the problem is its location. you need to make an effort to get there. The Bon Accord Center and the St Nicholas center get alot more traffic through there doors because you need to go through them to get places. I walk through the bon accord almost everyday to get to school. I'd be more likely to buy something there as its more convenient, but I guess thats just my lazy shopping skills.

Anyway, the first Saturday it opened was during Sean's visit, we wandered down in the afternoon feeling very hungover. We had a walk round and decided to check out one of the restaurants. There's all the usual crap you'd expect to find, like franky & bennies and all that crap. But something caught my eye, a restaurant called Hand Made Burgers. This seemed like heaven to me.

I love burgers, I love Hands, put the two together and what do you get?

thats right

Burger Hands!

thats not right

Hand Burgers?

No that would just be weird, plus how would you keep the hand in the bun?

So we check out the menu, I was happy to see there were no hands on the menu and all the employees had regular hands, not burger hands. That would be very weird, how would they grip things? Maybe its like Alan Partridge once thought, they use the burger as the palm and strap sausages on to use as fingers.

But alas that was not the case.

We greeted by a woman at front desk where we had to wait for a table to be wiped down.

she felt obliged to give us a running commentary of the servers actions as he was cleaning the table. This went on for about 2 minutes, this may not seem like much but it felt like an eternity to us, who were hungover and just wanted a seat and a burger.

Desk Lady: "It'll be 2 seconds while David gets a table clean for you, there he goes, off to the table. And he's wiping, he's very thorough, he's still wiping, he's getting rid of the dirty glass's. and he's re wiping. Oh he's such a good worker. And now he's just finishing up wiping the table and now he's lifting up the salt and pepper and cleaning under there too. Hmm seems a bit much, I never do that. I usually just wipe around them."

Andy "Interesting, I work for the environmental health you know."

She then promptly showed us to our table which was indeed very thoroughly wiped.

When we were seated we were told to place our order at the bar.

This slightly annoyed me, mainly cos I'm a lazy bugger. I don't see why they can't serve us. I suspect this is to speed up service so they can keep costs & training down to a minimum in order to get more people through the door. After studying the menu which has about 50 different kinds of burgers on it I decided on a classic cheese burger, while Sean went for a burger with blue cheese. I wandered up to the bar to order and get a couple of drinks. I noticed a sign saying they couldn't serve alcohol until November 3rd, this wasn't that big a deal for me as I couldn't quite face beer yet. I placed our orders got us a couple of diet cokes and headed back to the table. The food took a bit longer than I would have liked, around 25 minutes, its not that long but I was starving! The burgers were well worth the wait tho. They were immense! We both ordered a burger, a portions of fries each and onion rings to share. This was far too much! The burger was incredibly filling. Mine was also very greasy but I didn't mind. Our bill came to around £23. I would def go back. I feel a bit sorry for the staff working there tho. I suspect they don't get many tips. You need to pay upfront which I'm not fond of. The little service we did get was excellent. Thats not a criticism about there being little service, it's just the way the place is run. I actually forgot to tip. Being a restaurant monkey I always tip but it slipped my mind because I already paid and as I mentioned I was very hungover.

After the Burger place we headed to the new cinema. Its also quite swish. By this point we were feeling up to a beer. We bought tickets for The Invention of Lying and headed to the bar for a pre film drink. I think the bar staff must be pretty new. I ordered a carona and the barmaid gave me a glass with ice along with it. I left the glass but asked for a lime in my carona, this is how I know she is both new and not a seasoned drinker. I asked her for a slice of lime in my beer and she looked at me like I'd just asked if I could shit on a plate and have her eat it.

She said they had no lime then walked off looking at me like I was the weirdo.

As we were heading to the screen to see the movie. We handed over our tickets to the guy and I heard a voice over his radio.

"We have a code black at the box office"

Now I'm a big fan of code words, myself and Adam have several, including one for danger and one if we are with a lady. I'm not going to tell you what they are incase you one day try to kidnap me or are a lady who one day might be lucky enough to experience the Andy love. I realise that the kidnaping is more likely.

Anyway when I heard this over the mans radio

"I repeat we have a code black at the box office"

I was intrigued, a code black? That must be serious. Maybe someone is robbing them, maybe someone is dying, maybe someone is trying to buy tickets to the new Michael Jackson film but dyed there skin the wrong colour?

So I turned around to see the box office, to try and see all the drama, what was this code black? What was happening?

I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, no one had a gun, no one was on the floor dying, no one was dressed as Micheal Jackson circa 1975.

All I could see were four black people buying tickets for a film.

Now I'd like to think this is just a coincidence, but I couldn't see anything else happening. I'm not a racist, not by any means. I used to own a copy of Shaft on DVD. (who ever has that I'd like it returned)

So all in all the new Union Square seems alright.

I found this video on youtube which was the inspiration for the title of this blog entry. The video is a bit rubbish but the song is ACE!

If you can't see the video above then stop reading this crap on facebook and click here.

Thats all for now

Until Next Time

Have A Nice

Andy G

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