Boston Pops and Pho Basil

I'M FREE!!!!!!
Wow, I can't believe I'm already halfway through my second year of college! I'm so old!!

Anywho, I am done with all of my finals and currently sitting on my very own couch in my very own home in Upstate New York, staring out the window and threatening Mother Nature to give us snow by Christmas OR ELSE! But before we came home, I surprised my mom with tickets to the Holiday Pops concert and it was amazing! I am actually currently listening to their rendition of 12 Days of Christmas. I paid $4 for this download because it was that awesome. For each day of Christmas, they sing it to the tune of a different song..some examples are "A Few of My Favorite Things," "Halleluja," "Swan Lake" (guess which day that one was), and even "Bohemian Rhapsody." It was brilliant. The Tanglewood Choir accompanied them. I highly recommend going to bostonpops.org to download it, if you're the type of person who appreciates really good music.

And to make the night even better, we went to a delicious Thai-Vietmanese restaurant called Pho Basil on Massachusetts Ave. Overall, I was very impressed. Though it killed me, I went with the Saigon Noodle with tofu instead of my usual Vegetable Pad Thai, and I was very glad I did. It had the same deliciousness of the egg noodles and sauteed veggies with a little extra flavor. Very good!

My aunt and uncle shared the Spicy Basil with chicken. It was very tasty, but indeed very spicy! There was a LOT of red pepper flakes in it. That was kind of all I could taste after awhile (I know this because I accidentally ended up with their leftovers instead of mine =[ )

My mother decided to be adventurous with a dish that required her to dip rice paper in a bowl of hot water and then put the rice, shrimp and other veggies inside and then roll it up into a wrap. And if it wasn't already complicated enough, the didn't even peel the shrimp for her. Kind of annoying. And overall it was pretty tasteless. The vinegar sauce was good though!

And the grand finale....COCONUT ICE CREAM!! ...enough said.

I am so happy to be home so I can cook/bake/eat for the next 3 and a half weeks straight! 3 days till Christmas!!

Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of

So...it's finals week.. =[ Yeah, fun times. But before finals week, came the finals "study" period, which could only mean one thing...DAY TRIP TO NEW YORK CITY! I surprised my roommate with 3 Megabus tickets to NYC leaving at 6am and getting back at 3:30am for me, her, and our other friend. And SCORE! We got the most awesomest seats...front row on the top. Here was our lovely view going down 5th Avenue.

From there we took the Subway down to Wall St. and the South Street Seaport. (Side note: NYC subways are soooooo much more confusing than the T!! Like really...if my friend Vic hadn't worked in NYC before and knew her way around, it would've taken me probably 10 minutes of looking at the map before I figured out which subway we should get on. Like there's the 1, 2, 3, 4, F, R, J, Σ,...okay I'm just kidding about that last one, there was no Sigma Line, but anyway) From there we went to Batter Park and saw the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from across the water. And then we walked over to Ground Zero. I can't believe how far they have gotten on the new freedom tower!!

I guess it's just been awhile since I've been to the city. I was hoping I'd get to see the ponds and the memorial but NOOOO..you have to pay to get within like half a mile of it!! What?? They are profiting off of national tragedy! Not cool New York..not cool! This was the closest picture I could get from some pedestrian bridge. The giant hole that everyone is standing around is one of the ponds where one of the towers used to stand.

From there, we went back uptown and began our search for lunch. We knew we wanted Asian cuisine but couldn't settle on a restaurant. It's a hard decision! I mean...you're only in NYC so many times and there are SO many awesome places to eat! You don't want to end up with crappy food, knowing you could have had so much better! Well we eventually stumbled upon the Lan Sheng Szechuan Restaurant and (mostly because we were just starving at this point) decided that this is where we would eat. Price wise it was pretty good! $7.30 for your choice of Hot n' Sour Soup, Egg Drop Soup, Wonton Soup or a spring roll, an entree, and your choice of brown, white, or friend rice. We each got a different soup.

The Hot n Sour tasted like your average hot n sour soup. It was good but nothing extraordinary. My egg drop soup was very...eggy. Now I know that sounds dumb, but trust me. I've had egg drop soup before and I usually like it, but this tasted like i was just spooning a raw egg out of its shell. I personally didn't try the wonton soup because there were only two wontons in it and that is kind of the deciding factor of wonton soup. But Vic and Delaney both liked that one the best and said it was really good. For the entrees, we all got the fried rice and Vic got Chicken and Broccoli and Delaney got Kung Pau Chicken.

The Kung Pao chicken was good, it was loaded with amazing peanuts, but there was quite a bit of ginger in it and I HATE ginger. The chicken and broccoli, however, was amazing!! It just had such a unique taste to it, not just your average chicken and broccoli take out. It was so good. The fried rice was also good, but pretty much just standard fried rice. I got the Shrimp Pad Thai (which I was a little skeptical about getting this at a Szechuan restaurant but I love it so much, that I had to give it a try).

Overall, pretty good. Not the best Pad Thai I've ever had. Not even close. But I still found it very delicious. My friend Vic LOVED it, but she had never tried Pad Thai before. So she's definitely in for a treat next time. By the end of lunch, we had completely cleared our plates and waddled out of the restaurant on to more adventures in the city that never sleeps. But the rest of my adventures are for another blog post, because it is finals week and quite frankly, I will have nothing else to do for the next 4 days! Happy Friday everyone and have a great weekend!