Houston: U2 and the Festival of Meat

So last week I was on vacation, on my Tour of Places I Once Lived. First stop in said tour was to Houston, where I spent two and a half years in graduate school. While I don't miss Houston as a city (big and hot and dirty), I have several close friends there that I was looking forward to hanging out with.
There was another reason for the trip, too. Friday night I finally got to see U2 in concert for the first time with my friends Andy and Brant. I'm really no longer a fan of big arena concerts. There are several reasons for this. One, I'm getting old. Secondly, the smaller the venue the more intimate the music, and third, most of the musicians I like will never be popular enough to play in big arenas like this. This concert was a huge, huge exception. My first thought at the end of the concert: Why have I never seen U2 before? My second thought: I will never miss a U2 tour again. They were phenomenal. They played music off of every record except for the unfortunate Pop and Zooropa discs. Pride, With Or Without You, and Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own were all transcendental. I've rarely seen musicians as appreciative of the audience as Bono and the band were, and it showed through their music. We were stage left and up about fifty stories above the stage, but they still had the ability to draw everybody into the show. Even the drunk teenage lesbian hookers who sat in front of us, but that's a different story.
Saturday night I partook in my favorite Houston tradition, which I will refer to as the Festival of Meat. Andy, Jeff, Mia, and myself went to one of my favorite restaurants, Fogo De Chao, which loosely translates into Feast, you Gluttonous Carnivore. Fogo is a Brazilian steakhouse, or a churrascaria, if you will. There is no menu. You sit at your table. There is a fancy salad bar that you must ignore, for it would only take up valuable stomach space. A small card is placed in front of you. On one side, it is red; the other, green. You take several deep cleansing breaths, and turn to the card to green.
Almost immediately, like some wonderful meat fairy, waiters, dressed in bright gaucho outfits (gaucho roughly translates to gay cowboy), swoop out of the air with skewers of meat. A cornucopia of meat. Garlic sirloin, filet mignon, top sirloin, beef ribs, leg of lamb, pork ribs, parmesan-encrusted pork, various other animals. It goes on this way until you flip the little card back to red. Once your plate is cleared you can flip back to green and the fairies swoop in again. Basically you eat until animal fat oozes from your pores. Complete and utter yumsters.
One unfortunate side effect of the Festival of Meat (especially when combined with the huge portion of beef fajitas consumed before the U2 concert the night before), was a complete work stoppage in my colon. The whole system went down, and it took a few days for it to come back online. Thought I should share the bad along with the good.

ps. I wanted to give a public shout-out to my friend Andy, who, a few days after the Festival of Meat learned he passed the Bar Exam. Congratulations! He can now officially usurp Mr. Adler to become the next Texas Hammer, at least among Houston's Korean population.