New York, New Year

Wow!  Three months since I posted.  I always let the back end of the year get away from me and this year was no exception.  I didn't even do my usual end of year/new year musings.   I'll have to try to fit that in sooner or later.  Or I guess I could just skip it this year.

Let's see.  I have so much to talk about.  Guess I'll do this blog about my trip to the Big Apple and catch up on other things in another blog.

I have a good friend in medical school in New York, so I went to visit her for five days the week before Christmas and we had a blast!   I can totally see why people love New York.  Everything is there.  And I mean EVERYTHING.  Things we can only get online in Dallas, you can actually stop and pick up in a relatively accessible store.  Authentic food from probably every known culture.  Yum!   And of course, Times Square, Broadway, Rockefeller Center, etc.  It was impossible to do everything in five days, so we were selective of course, but everything we did was fun.

First of all, all transportation was public, which was really different for me with my independence defined by my car.  You can't live without a car in Dallas.  In New York it's not only possible, it's often preferable.  Traffic isn't pretty.  Also, I've never been on a subway in the US before so it was a learning experience. I've been on the London Underground, the Paris Metro and several systems in Japan, but nothing here in the US.  I'm VERY glad to have had my friend to act as guide.   She was in charge of getting us from point A to point B and did a great job at it.  

My friend lives in Jersey City, so we went into New York every day for food, shopping and entertainment.  We ate Greek food, we ate Falafels, we ate the best greasy cheeseburgers I've ever had, we ate authentic Japanese at a place where we were the only non-Asians inside.  Basically we ate our way through 5 days. 

We went to see Wicked!  AWESOME!  I had never been to a Broadway show, so likely I would have considered anything we saw awesome, but Wicked really was amazing.  I want to see it again.  And I now have the soundtrack for it.   

We went to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center at night, which is the first picture in this blog, and also wandered around looking at all the Christmas decorations, which are the other pictures.  As you can see, all the decorations were amazing, although of course the pictures never do them justice and I can't possibly post all the pictures I took. 

We went shopping pretty much every day.  On one side of Macy's the windows are all done with fancy Christmas scenes and puppets.  Those window scenes I absolutely could not do justice to with a picture, but this will maybe give you a little flavor of what they were like.  "Magical" is probably a good word.   In fact I'd have to say the New York is fairly magical at this time of year.

We got home pretty exhausted every evening after walking and wandering around Manhattan all day, but it was sooooooo worth it.  One minor downside - temperature.  One day in Manhattan the high temp was 27 degrees, which as you know is WAY too cold for this Texas girl.  Hats, gloves, thick scarves, heavy coat ... these are absolute 'musts' for December in New York.  And add an umbrella for those wet days.  Still the weather didn't slow us down much.  We still had a blast. 

Oh, one other minor downside, I picked up a Yankee virus, which I was coming down with the day I flew back home, and then I kindly took with me to east Texas for Christmas.  Hopefully my whole family didn't end up with it. 

So that was the NY trip.  More on the rest of my life in the next blog.