If I had to describe our trip in one word, it'd be....
FOOD.
If I had two words, they'd be....
FOOD.
TRAFFIC.
Seriously, I think I'd weigh 500 lbs and have to use a Jazzy to get around if I lived in Philadelphia. Well, maybe not. Okay, probably not. But, I'd be fatter. There was a lot of good food in that city. Combine that with the fact that we had 3 real evenings in Philly (Thursday, Friday, Saturday) and only one real day (Saturday) to sight see (as we were traveling on Thursday and testing on Friday), and we really did spend a disproportionate amount of time eating, since museums, etc. aren't open in the evening but restaurants are.
And we spent a lot of time in traffic. We stayed near the airport in South Philly, but did most of our eating/touristing/etc. in the city center, and we visited my great aunt in North Philly, and our test was in a borough to the West of the city, and all those things are geographically close, but traffic is like 2038420348 times worse than back home, so it takes 15 million years to drive 15 miles (or maybe more like an hour, but still). No wonder smart people walk/bike/bus/hopscotch instead of driving in that city. I'm not going to write more about the traffic because, unlike food, it is boring, but just trust me. Traffic was a HUGE part of this trip.
I had visited Philly in fourth grade and had had an amazing trip. My family stayed with my great aunt over spring break one year and celebrated Easter up there. We saw tons of historic sites, museums, visited the nearby chocolate factory, Chinatown, etc. I kept an amazing journal of the trip in which I taped souvenirs, like the foil top of my orange juice from the plane, the wrapper from my fun size candy bar from the chocolate factory, ticket stubs, and Easter grass. I'm thinking about trying to get that particular memoir published.
Aaron, however, had never been to the City of Brotherly Love. He called his brother for some advice, since Stephen lived in Philly for his pre-novitiate year. He hadn't really gotten to see much of Philly since he was busy praying/studying/etc., but he did tell us which cheese steak place to go to. We totally forgot what he said, and accidentally went to the "wrong" one for lunch after arriving in the mid afternoon on Thursday. Oh well.
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| Total nubes. We didn't know better! But our unrefined palates still enjoyed it! ;-) |
Thursday evening, we were blessed to connect with James and Eleanor, some married friends of ours from college. James is working on a PhD, Eleanor on an MD, and it was so much fun to catch up with them! I totally failed in the planning ahead department and called Eleanor from our hotel on Thursday afternoon, but we lucked out and they were available and invited us over to their apartment. We met their cute pets, chatted for a bit, then headed to a delicious Middle Eastern restaurant. We followed that up with more good conversation and some tasty gelato before heading back to their apartment, then to our hotel to try to get a good night sleep before our test.
Friday, all day, we had our exam. There are standardized patients there in fake exam rooms and you have a set amount of time to do a history and physical and write a note on the encounter before moving on to the next standardized patient. There were 10 encounters total. If you've ever seen the Seinfeld episode "The Burning," Kramer and Mickey get an acting gig as standardized patients, and have to pretend to have illnesses like cirrhosis and gonorrhea. (If you haven't seen that episode, you should probably watch it, just FYI. It's classic.)
Anyhow, one of the funniest things that happened was, you guessed it, FOOD related. Someone (can't remember who now... must have been quite a bit older than me!) told me that the lunch at the test was rather inadequate (maybe back in the day they just had saltines and water for lunch??), so advised me to bring snacks. I sent Aaron out to buy snacks at a local grocery store the night before our test since I was busy ironing our clothes. I told him to get some granola bars or something. Well, he returned with granola bars, chocolate covered graham crackers, bags of fun size Butterfinger and Snickers, off brand Fig Newtons, fruit snacks, a large can of honey roasted peanuts, huge bottles of gatorade, and big bottles of water. HAHAHA!
I ended up just bringing a couple granola bars and water, since I figured the granola bars would provide plenty of energy if the lunch ended up being small and I got hungry, but Aaron brought his jug of gatorade, can of honey roasted peanuts, a few snickers bars, and a couple packets of fruit snacks. In his white coat pockets. He looked like he had the world's most hilariously disproportionate saddlebags. We all had assigned seats at a table for lunch, and could put any food, medicine, etc. at our place rather than in our locker, if we wanted to, before we began our exam. NO ONE ELSE had ANYTHING sitting at their place, but I had some eye drops for my annoyingly dry eyes and my couple granola bars and Aaron had like 15 foodstuffs, enough for a LAN party of 23 teenage boys. Our lunch was a large sub sandwich, chips, a big cookie, and they had a fridge full of soda and water, which was, of course, more than adequate. I can just imagine what people were thinking, looking at Aaron and his horde of food:
"Does this skinny kid have a tapeworm?"
"Is he diabetic and accidentally overdosed on insulin this morning causing such low blood sugars that he needs a liter of gatorade, a can of honey roasted peanuts, candy, and fruit snacks to raise his blood sugar?"
"What a weirdo."
"What a freak."
"This guy is going to be 500 lbs and need a Jazzy to get around by the time he's 30."
We both felt good about how the test went, and left the testing center feeling confident about our scores and about our ability to survive the apocalypse or any natural disaster with our filling station shelf-worth of nonperishable snacks.
Naturally, after getting back to our hotel to get changed, we went out to dinner! Yes, that's right. More food. I told you I wasn't kidding about eating a lot. We went to Chinatown and enjoyed going in a lot of the little shops and walking the streets, before going to a nice seafood place for dinner.
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| Such a cute tea set! Note the ever so slight double chin... it was soon to be tripling, then quadrupling on this trip. |
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| Spicy fried soft shell crabs. Delicious! |
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| And lobster! Double delish! |
Our friends had emailed us with some good places to visit while in Philly, and mentioned a crêpe truck in the email, so, after dinner, we hurried to get crêpes for dessert before it closed. I mean, we pretty much needed them, right? My trip to France freshmen year of college left me with quite a taste for crêpes. When we made a wrong turn on that would have required some significant circling on the one-way streets, Aaron slowed down and I jumped out of the car and ran to the crêpe truck. Yes, literally ran. Maybe faster than I've ever run. Maybe. Sneakers hitting the pavement, heart beating out of my chest. I got there right before it closed. And ordered a nutella-crunchy peanut butter-banana crepe for myself and a nutella-banana-strawberry one for Aaron. And it was so worth the run. I'm sure I burned off all the calories from the crêpe by running to the crêpe truck, right? Melty, oozy, delicious. Soooo good.
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| See the artsy sprinkling of powdered sugar? And the ooziness of the nutella and peanut butter? You would have run for this, too. Admit it. |
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| My prize. |
On Saturday, we went to Reading Terminal market to do some shopping. It was so cool in there! Mostly Pennsylvania Dutch Amish vendors selling baked goods, meats, cheeses, fresh vegetables, canned goods, jams, candles, cookies, etc. Of course, we had to sample. We shared a fresh sticky bun. We also shopped for my wanna-be-Asian sister in Chinatown that morning. You're welcome, Sarah.
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| Wish we had a market like this back home! |
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| We were in the middle of watching an anime (my first and only), "Death Note," (which was actually very good) and there's a TV station in the show called Sakura. So we had to get a picture. |
Then, we headed North to visit my great-aunt Barbara and honorary great-uncle Bill. We had a lovely visit with them and she made us a great lunch, where we ate far too much food yet again - roast beef sandwiches with horseradish sauce, deli pickles, fruit salad, potato salad, multiple desserts! Picking up on a theme, here? I hadn't been to her house since fourth grade, and it was neat to be back, and so good to see those two, and to meet another friend of hers who dropped by for a bit.
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| I love formal place settings. So beautiful and quaint. Makes me want to buy china someday. |
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| The beautiful view of downtown from the highway. |
We headed back to the city center to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. We didn't have tickets to the latter, so we just saw the outside. Then, we went to mass at the cathedral. It was beautiful! We told people afterward that we had mass with Archbishop Chaput, but then had to say "just kidding!" because we didn't, but it was still a lovely, memorable liturgy in a gorgeous church.
Afterward... I don't even have to tell you anymore, do I? You know exactly what we did, don't you? Yes, you're right. We got dinner! We ordered a "small" white pizza with veggies and "small" meat stromboli at this hole in the wall pizza place... and, well... a picture is worth a thousand words. Just look below and laugh. Needless to say, we didn't finish our food. Believe it or not.
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| Even lightweight Aaron is getting a double chin, expanding just by looking at this much food! Avert your eyes if you don't want one, too. |
The next morning, we checked out of our hotel, returned our rental car, and headed home. We were so happy to see Julia again! We brought her back some souvenirs - a dress from Chinatown and a book about Ben Franklin from the Independence Hall museum.
I'm pretty sure I didn't have any need or desire to eat at all for about a month after Philly, so, net weight wise, the trip was pretty good for me and my health.
And Oklahoma "traffic" seemed glorious.
Philly was great, but there's no place like home.
The End.
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