This past weekend Chris and I met up in Philadelphia, where neither of us had really been (I had gone when I was 10 or 12 with my grandparents for an afternoon) and so we got to be cold little pedestrian tourists... It was a good 10-20 degrees warmer there than it was in Montreal, so I was happy to 'go south' (ha) for a weekend. I didn't even need my big brown coat!
We stayed downtown/financial district, which was a good, central location but it also sucked because everything in the area is closed on the weekend so we had a tough time finding food a couple times. But Starbucks was open! There was one on nearly every corner, the way it was in NYC... And thank goodness, because it was cold and we definitely needed the hot beverages...
We wandered down to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the famous steps that Rocky runs up in the movie), past lots of cool historical sites and buildings (of course) and Love Park. The next day we wandered over to Penn's Landing, which is on the Delaware River, and New Jersey is on the other side (as I would experience later) and that night we went to a really good Italian restaurant for dinner, and then went back to the hotel to watch the Oscars (yay tv!!)
Monday we just wandered near the hotel since we'd have to leave in the early afternoon for the airport, and for lunch we found this cool indoor marketplace by the Convention Center that had everything -- fish market, meat market, oyster bar, local honey, chocolates, sushi, mediterranean food... There was a little lunch counter place called the Down Home Diner which supported local farmers, and who can say no a place like that. We were on the hunt for breakfast food, but since they were only serving lunch by that time, we settled on soup and grilled cheese sandwiches... Chris said it was the best grilled cheese he'd ever had (Vermont cheddar on good seedy bread) and I rank it in my Top 5 Grilled Cheese. So despite all our ravenous wandering over the course of the weekend, we found a couple really good places that made it worth it.
My flight back to Montreal was supposed to be Monday night, but it got cancelled (they couldn't close the door on what was to be our plane) and the airline put people from our flight up in a hotel - a hotel in New Jersey... So I got a bonus night for my long weekend at a hotel (motel) in Gloucester, NJ and stayed up late eating cookies (since that was the only food I had) and watching MTV and Oprah..
It was good to get out of Montreal for a few days and be in a place where I could speak the language and have a decent grasp of what was going on. Not that I'm totally out of it and oblivious here, but even going to Philadelphia for a few days, a city I haven't been to, made me feel a little more in my element than I feel here sometimes. But its still cold there!
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