A Visit From My Family

Last week, I was very lucky to be able to spend a lot of time with my family, who were visiting for the week during my sister's school break. They flew in on Sunday, 2/17, and I met them for dinner in Midtown. We went to this great sushi place called Kodama. Some of their specialty rolls were excellent, and I always enjoy some basic shrimp or tuna sushi. My dad told me that the restaurant was an excellent find, and I replied that I found it on Urbanspoon. Apparently I should play it off as having local knowledge.

The next day, we went to the Museum of Natural History. There was a very cool exhibit on the scale of the universe, using the planetarium as a scale to compare other objects to. It's still hard to conceptualize the size relationships in the universe, but walking around this exhibit helped give me a sense of scale. There were many exhibits of animals (the taxidermy variety) set up in the sort of habitats they inhabit in the wild. I'm always curious to learn more about different animals and their unique characteristics, and the museum gave me a sudden urge to watch Planet Earth. Seeing some of the dinosaur skeletons inspired discussion of the possibility of bringing animals back to life, but I don't know why we would want to bring back Neanderthals, let alone dinosaurs.

Not a real Easter Island statue, unfortunately.

After the Museum of Natural History, we got a late lunch at a restaurant on the Upper West Side called Sarabeth's. My family all enjoyed their lunches, and I enjoyed mine at the time, but the smoked salmon omelette appeared to be the cause of a brutal case of food poisoning that I suffered from the next day and a half. We followed lunch with a walk down through Central Park, where my sister was set on seeing a statue of some dog, named Balto. My dad and I started chanting "Baldo! Baldo!" and eventually my sister joined in. I don't know exactly why we started, but it provided a lot of laughs on the chilly walk through the park.

After walking down towards Times Square, we got on the subway towards Brooklyn, as my parents wanted to see my room. After a quick stop there (not a lot to see), we had a nice dinner at the Park Plaza Restaurant, a pleasant diner just a few minutes from my building. My buffalo chicken sandwich was very solid, and we had a nice dinner there, away from the slight chaos of Midtown Manhattan.

Wednesday night we met to go to "The Book of Mormon", a critically-acclaimed show written by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. It fit their usual edgy and absolutely hilarious humor, and did not disappoint. I'm very thankful to my parents for taking me to this, as musicals are a little bit out of the norm for me, but I found this one wildly entertaining.

Thursday I met them for lunch and dinner. The Carnegie Deli served up as-expected huge portions for dinner, and I was unable to finish my half of the reuben that I shared with my dad. It was a glorious mound of bread covered in delicious slabs of corned beef, sauerkraut, and covered in melted Swiss cheese. My appetite was not back to full capacity yet after the bout of food poisoning earlier in the week, unfortunately. After dinner, we found a cupcake shop called Crumbs (which has several locations on Manhattan) and got cupcakes there. I really enjoyed being able to sit down and enjoy them with my family in their hotel room, just relaxing and spending time with them.

Friday was another wonderful night. Outside of the hotel room, there were repeatedly massive traffic jams of people trying to park in the parking garage there. Multiple lanes would be clogged up, and the intersection would get blocked. The policeman there was very busy, needless to say. Something like that just doesn't happen in Seattle, so it was fascinating to watch it play out. We enjoyed a nice dinner at the Hourglass Tavern, on 46th Street between 8th and 9th, which is the famous Restaurant Row, I believe. They seemed to do a lot of business before the theater shows started. My pork roast was juicy and flavorful. We all wanted to stop at Junior's for some of their famous cheesecake after dinner (my family had it a few times while they were here). While I was disappointed the tiramisu cheesecake was not available by slice, the raspberry swirl cheesecake did the trick just fine. The mixture of delicious flavors made a great dessert. I stayed in the hotel room until just after 11 pm, when I left to meet my friend John, who took a late bus from Boston that night. The next day turned out to be one of the greatest of my life. I'll save it for its own entry, which should be up tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!