Take me down to the Alphabet City!

For Shannon's Xmas gift, I decided to give her a vacation in her favorite US city, NYC. The actual gift took place at the end of last month. We spent 6 days over there, and had a good time. And for the first time in my life, I got to go do something in New Jersey! Twice!

The main reason she likes NYC is due to Broadway, so of course the gift had to also include a broadway show. We actually ended up going to two shows, Wicked and Curtains. I enjoyed Wicked and really liked Curtains (David Hyde Pierce played the main character). I am not a musical buff, but I do enjoy the ones that are funny (Like SpamAlot, Young Frankestein, etc) and that is a reason why I really enjoyed Curtains.

We went to a movie/TV sites tour, which was pretty cool. A bus took us to a bunch of places where they have shot movies and TV shows (Mostly exterior shots, of course, since most of the insides for the TV shows in 90s we learned actually happened in LA!) . Some places we visited were the Soup Natzi kitchen from Seinfield, the Friends "building", the Cosby "house", places where they shot movies like Hitch, Ghostbuster, Big, etc. It was very entertaining, and we got to see a lot of New York in the process. One of the stops was this place called Rice to Riches (where one of Hitch's scenes took place), where they server all kinds of flavors of Rice pudding! I mean, I am not too much into rice pudding, but they made it taste pretty freaking good. They had flavors like cookies cream, peanut butter, butter pecan, coffee, etc. Think of it as an ice cream shop but with pudding instead of ice cream.

We also did some more touristy type stuff: We spent a day at the Met, we took a cruise to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (where we learned a bunch of interesting information regarding the immigration in the late 1800s-early 1900s), we watched the sunset from the top of the Empire State Building, visited St. Patrick's Cathedral, and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge (Nice view and good exercise at the same time :) ). It was pretty fun!

Now, you will say, where does New Jersey fit into all of this? Well, first we went to visit some friends who live in NJ. We met in Hoboken, and had dinner there, at a restaurant that offers a magnificent view of the NY skyline, and then went to see their place. The second time we went to New Jersey was to go to Newark... why, you may ask? Well, noting that my wife is a wonderful person, her Xmas present also involved going to 2 NHL games!!!!!!! The first one was the NJ Devils against the Philadelphia Flyers, which was also my first experience of seeing a game end in a Shootout (Devils won the game), and the other was to see Sid the Kid and the Penguins face against Jags and the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. This game also went to OT, but it was won by the Rangers on an OT goal by Chris Drury.

All in all, fun times was had by all. It left a different impression of NYC than I had previously (where I thought it was just dangerous and dirty).

Okay, until next time! Peace out!