Trip To Philly and New York

I left Chi-town on the 12th for a week-long trip to go visit Shewara in Philly, where she lives sometimes. Pictured above is the SEPTA stop for Manayunk, a classy shopping district outside Philly. While Manayunk managed to impress me with its amazing collection of random record shops, Tibetan- and African-themed stores, as well as good eats, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority actually managed to piss us off by randomly deciding to stop running trains (!!!!) in the middle of a Friday evening. Right after a huge concert. But we still had bunches of fun. The trip was originally billed as a chance for me to check out prospective graduate schools, but we ditched that in favor of more fun times. The totality of the awesome fun that was had can not be fully described in a short little post, but here is a short list:

Philly Cheese Steak remnants---->

During the trip, we successfully:
-Attended a Franz Ferdinand concert (awesome)
-Ate at a classy Peruvian restaurant, where I had ceviche - a dish I have been dying for for over a year
-Bought two random really old books (one 1848, other 1906)
-Got free admission to no less than TWO of the world's great art musems: the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (note the awesome MoMA painting below), where we saw many of the world's great artworks (but somehow managed to miss Hokusai's "Great Wave," which I'm sure you are familiar with from college dorm room posters)













-Made Rama Chicken and Gnocchis with Vodka Sauce, two of my faovrite dishes, while also consuming tons of tea, chocolate, and canolis.
-Visited Philly's historic district, where we saw: Ben Franklin's printing press, tomb, and house; the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall (both below); a Quaker Church dating from the early1800s (the Quakers, or "Society of Friends,"are some of our new favorite people); America's oldest continuously inhabited residential area (since 1703); and to cap it all off we were kicked out of the United States Mint

-Watched two fascinating films "Paris is Burning"(1990) and "The Women"(1939)
-Ate random chicken food on the streets of New York, while at the same time discovering the very large and surprisingly important distinction between 6th street and 6th avenue in Manhattan
-And visited the very small and undoubtedly underappreciated and under-funded Mario Lanza Institute in south Philly.

Don't you wish you could have come?