from the desk of tara hope…

this was my ONLY weekend in NYC for the month of august, so i wanted to make sure we made the most of it! and i think we accomplished that goal!

friday we walked through riverside park with sarah on our way to see some shakespeare. this is the garden from “youve got mail” where they meet at the end and fall in love 🙂 so pretty!

the hudson warehouse put on “romeo and juliet” at the soldiers memorial in riverside park. i had never seen the actual play of r+j. just the ballet and the movies. it was long…but really good 🙂 and it was so neat being outside watching the sun go down as the final dramatic scenes were taking place!

afterwards we took sarah to sal and carmines pizza because she had never been there before. we got there just in time for a couple of their last slices, and ate them at the bus stop benches. it was definitely a yummy way to end a fun evening outdoors 🙂

saturday morning sarah and i took an afro-jazz class at the Y…with about 8 elderly women. it was cute….and a very slow class 🙂 afterwards we did some of the weight training machines…and now i can no longer walk, or raise my arms above my shoulders. when i got home, husby was grilling up a storm, so i ran and picked up some more ingredients to throw on the grill. we ended up having a lunch of steak, grilled mediterranean veggies, and spinach-artichoke cheese bread.

that night we FINALLY watched our “precious” dvd from netflix. ive seriously had it for a month now, and we just couldnt find the right time to watch it. but im glad i finally saw it! it was so good(really sad…but good) and reminded me why i wanted to volunteer with domestic violence victims. i need to find a place in NYC to do that.

sunday morning we slept in, then headed up to harlem for an early lunch.

since moving to NYC we kept hearing about this man named charled gabriel, and his famous fried chicken. well, i dont know why it took us so long because the hype was true. it was sooooo good. just like home-cooking from the south! we filled up on collards, mac and cheese, black-eyed peas, sweet tea and of course fried chicken!

i had 2 plate-fulls(!) and didnt think i was going to make it home. especially when we took a different way back and realized we were going to have to walk up all these stairs to get to the subway…

between being sore form working out, and being so full i couldnt breath, i really thought i might pass out from those stairs. but thankfully we made it out after a short rest at the top 🙂 it was a good way to work off that chicken, though! 🙂

to end our weekend we went uptown a bit to symphony space to watch hitchcock’s “vertigo” on the big screen. it was in color, in HD, and AWESOME! 🙂

we ended the night at a sushi place near our house…delicious! we felt like “real new yorkers” eating sushi after midnight in our neighborhood. its funny how that feeling still seems exciting after all this time 🙂