Thanksgiving week in NYC was, as expected, great. The weather was beautiful, it was really fun to share it with the whole family plus friends, and New York is always fun to visit.
Jon and I arrived to LGA on Wednesday night, pretty late, and called it a night. He was staying with his friend Joe, I stayed at Sarah's. Thanksgiving morning started off early with watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which was really pretty cool. I think it may be my one and only trip to see the parade, but I'm glad we watched it. A large midday feast was followed up with a walk through Central Park- the picture of all of us above. I hadn't seen Felicia in over a year, so it was really great to see them. The rest of the week was spent doing touristy stuff- which I always enjoy, but it has come to the point that when I visit NYC, I've done all the really big things, so I like to focus on hanging out and walking around. We got to do a lot of that around Sarah's neighborhood, hitting up some restaurants and sights that she's been telling me about lately. Big fan of
Lansky's and
Zabar's. Good tasty food :) We got to give Stephanie her first taste of Jewish food, and New York for that matter.
One silly, but amazingly cool thing, that we visited was the
Charmin Times Square toil
ets. I'm not really sure why I was so amused/impressed/amazed with the whole thing, but it was so cool. It had to have cost them a fortune, and was so gimicky. But awesome. I'm kind of a big fan of anywhere in NYC that offers public toilets that are fully stocked with TP (and different Charmin variaties, of course!) and cleaned after every usage. Go Charmin... and the catchy jingle that they play in the building is still going through my head....
We thankfully had amazing weather until my last day- Sunday. We should have renamed it Rainday in an effort to truly capture how amazingly horrible it was. There was a light rain all day, but not really light enough to need an umbrella. And it was too windy to use an umbrella... they kept turning inside out like in the cartoons. Plus, it was freezing and got dark at like 4pm.
Overall, it was such a fun trip, and I'm so happy we all got to get together to celebrate together. I guess the next big, full family adventure is our wedding... I can't wait until February!
Happy Hanukkah! Tonight marks the beginning of the eight days of Hanukkah... which I marked by having Christy and Tracy over for a tasty dinner of latkes and matzo ball soup. I've only made latkes once, and that was with a recipe a friend gave me. Tonight, I used Missy's recipe for latkes (I love hers- they're the best). In addition to the giant mess that I made (I swear, I'm the messiest cook ever), I made some pretty kickin latkes. They were quite delicious. I topped that off with some hot and tasty matzo ball soup.
We got some really great menorah's at our engagement party, so we lit those, in addition to one I already had. Christy took some more pictures- I'll post those when I get them from her. Hooray for Hanukkah!
