One of the Cool Kids in Denver
I knew from the moment we dumped our backpacks on the floor of Illegal Pete's, home to healthy and delicious Mexican food and kids sporting band t-shirts and nose piercings, that Denver was going to be cool.
Not self-consciously so, and not remotely chic or polished - but one of those cities that just revels in it's underrated appeal, its grittiness. The kind of place where the residents give off an effortless, carefree attitude, and a thriving arts and culture scene stands testament to the young people here who are switched on, engaged and have plenty to say.
Sliding into a sticker-plastered booth and tucking into a fresh tilipia taco stuffed with shredded lettuce and prickly hot sauce, we planned our time in the city. Slugging bottomless Doctor Pepper (which, for some reason, is everywhere. I'm sure I haven't drunk this in the UK since I was a kid?), we read about the infamous Denver Beer Trail, the RiNo art district, the iconic Union Station and the city's oldest restaurant The BuckHorn Exchange, where they sell Rocky Mountain Oysters (tip: they're not really oysters. They're bull testicles. Yep. Tell me about it. Ick. Needless to say, I didn't order any).
It was to be our second visit to Colorado in as many weeks. However, I imagined the city of Denver to be a bit different from the mountain town of Breckenridge. We were very kindly hosted by Abbie's brother Everett and his girlfriend Alison (thanks again guys!), so had the perfect base from which to explore Denver for three full days.
Much of our time was spent skimming the outskirts of Denver, exploring the foothills, the atmospheric Red Rocks Ampitheatre, the frozen wonderland of the Botanic Gardens and, without being hyperbolic, the breathtaking Rocky Mountain National Park. But these things deserve a blogpost of their own, so let's stay within the city limits for now.
We walked a lot, and as our feet swallowed up the pavement, our eyes devoured the views as we passed from one district of Denver to another. We walked through quiet, leafy neighbourhoods filled with affluent young professionals to wide, sorry streets lined with markets and pawn shops, which obviously closed their shutters for the last time many years ago. Areas populated with bars, restaurants and boutiques sprang up from nowhere, as they often do when you explore a place on foot. By car or bus, you're transported into the centre of where you want to go. When you walk, you experience both the place itself and the journey it takes to get there, it's delicate positioning in its surroundings.
We opted to go to Ace for lunch, a bar and restaurant offering cheap-ish Asian food and a huge ping pong hall, dripping with that typical Denver brand of cool. I've talked before about how I'm not the most sporty person in the world, but I sure play a mean game of table tennis. We slurped salty Tom Kha and munched steamed buns crammed full of spicy pork belly, all washed down with cool Vietnamese coffee and Thai iced tea.
"Don't worry about it," the waitress purred with a shrug when we asked how much it would cost to play ping pong. "There's not many people here anyway. You guys play as much as you want." She took our order without writing it down and sloped away with a smile, seemingly without a care in the world. We played to our heart's content. I didn't even care when I lost - perhaps Denver's chilled out attitude was rubbing off on me.
However, the epicentre of Denver's coolness is indisputably RiNo, or the River North Art District. It's home to a dense collection of creative businesses, galleries and breweries. This is where Denver shows it's offbeat, independent and fiercely creative core - and it's fantastic.
We witnessed it from a number of angles, starting with how a simple idea is allowed to flourish here and become a tangible concept; namely, the Chocolate Crisis Centre. Located on Walnut Street, adjacent to a creative agency for who it is a beloved brainchild, the Chocolate Crisis Centre offers packaged chocolate kits tailored to a number of emergencies; from a break-up to surviving the first weeks with a newborn. Allowing you to become "part of the art", you can fill out a form to find out your diagnosis and remedy. The best part? There's a free tasting station, meaning you can sample all of the delicious flavours before buying, and flavours range from white chocolate gingerbread crunch to dark chocolate salted almonds. Perhaps the unique, artsy vibe was catching, because we opted for the bizarre combination of milk chocolate blueberries. Luckily, they were delicious.
Walking around RiNo I was reminded of Philadelphia, where elaborate murals scrawled on the walls tell the story of the city through a thousand different pairs of eyes. Here, the art leaks from under the doors of the galleries and exhibitions and forces itself through spray paint canisters, meaning almost every visible surface is illustrated. The practice seems more disciplined here than in Philly - each work is a showcase of talent and passion rather than an angrily drawn political statement or expose of injustice.
Take a closer look at the huge, industrial warehouses in RiNo: they're almost all breweries. Denver is apparently just as famous as Winconsin for its craft beer; but we had to pop into a few breweries, you know, just to make sure. Epic Brewing have a fantastic selection of beers, and you can opt for little tasters, like we did, if you can't quite make up your mind. They also do brewery tours, although we weren't sure any tour could truly surpass the one we'd done in Milwaukee, so we opted to move on to the Stem Cider Brewery instead. My favourite was Branch & Bramble. Sweet, tart, and raspberry coloured - but still dry enough to be considered a grown-up drink!
In both breweries, the tables were filled with young people, laughing, chatting and drinking as the sun set outside on the illustrated tableau of RiNo. They had the same relaxed, sunny almost lazy dispositions as the waitress in Ace - like we're young, the world is good, and there's nothing to worry about really. And I think that's what's at the centre of Denver's too cool for school aesthetic. Optimism.
