How to Celebrate your Third Anniversary

This post is dedicated to Lo Gung. On November 12, 2005 he agreed to be my best friend, my husband and the daddy for the rest of eternity. We were sealed for time and all eternity in the Seattle Washington Temple and had a great reception that night with all of our friends and family. Thank you, honey, for being my best friend. I love you.

From Bubba Bubbles

Well, the poll is closed, the results are in..and only 8 of you voted?! See, I'm wise to you guys - I know there are over 50 of you...and that's a LOT of lurkers. Umm...hi? What do you say to a lurker?

Anyhow, here's how the poll shook out:

Dinner and a movie near home: 0 votes
Nice Lunch and a Broadway Show in the City: 1 vote
Asian Food and a Trip to Chinatown: 3 votes
Stayed Home and Watched a Movie: 4 votes

Hmm....FAIL! Well, 5 of you FAIL, anyhow. Honestly, until Friday night, we were totally planning on a really nice buffet at a churrascaria (Brazilian all-you-can-eat STEAK house) followed by a matinee on Broadway. Then, I remembered that, hey! I'm pregnant! I can barely eat a BBJ sized portion of lunch. Since I didn't know how I was going to fit enough meat in my purse to make the $50-per-head cheque reasonable, we scrapped that idea. Then we remembered that neither of us was super excited about the shows that would be available to us, not to mention our dislike of sitting still. (Well, I like to sit still, but Baby Boy has other plans.)

So, back to the drawing board! I put up a plea for ideas on Serious Eats Talks and just sat back and waited. There were lots of great ideas, for lots of expensive, splurge-worthy places. Following their advice, and then relying on reviews, we eventually found ourselves making plans for...a ramen house! I've never had real ramen, so I was really excited. We made plans to follow up our authentic ramen lunch with a trip to Flushing, in Queens - a separate Chinatown, and one that we've never visited.

Oh, and we decided to drive to the city. 'Cause we're brilliant.

On Saturday morning, we dropped BBJ off at Aunt SheShe's house (she's our fabulous adopted grandma/neighbor) and left for the city. In our little Honda Fit. Whee!

The drive was beautiful, I have to admit. We hit some traffic at the toll booth...and never really bothered to look at where our trusty little GPS was taking us.

Well, she took us right past the Chocolate Festival at Pier 94 (so sad!)...and turned us left onto 46th Street. As in - one of the busiest roads in Manhatten. A straight shot to our destination, true, but...umm...yeah. This was our view for about 15 minutes:




Oh, and don't forget this lovely view.




Around this point, we decided to bag it and go home. Lo Gung had actually punched our home address into the GPS and was going to turn at the light, get back on the freeway, and go home. I hoped a stop at McDonald's was in our future, because Baby Boy was getting hungry.

Luckily, by the time we reached the light, he'd had a change of heart. We drove our little Fit straight through Times Square and went on to our parking garage. (Parking in the city's garages is cheaper on the weekends. What would have been a $50 tab the day before was only $13 in parking fees on a Saturday!)

Our lunch was only a short walk away. We went to Menchanko Tei, and it was tasty. If you've never had ramen before, it's like Top Ramen...only ten million times tastier. Check it out:



Have you ever seen Top Ramen with tofu, scallions, prawns, fish balls, rice cakes and cabbage? No? I thought not! This is actually the Menchanko bowl - the only difference is that the noodles are much thicker...but oh, so tasty!

Seriously - I think the ramen was the highlight of Lo Gung's day.

My highlight came shortly afterwards. We wandered back down to Grand Central, and entered by way of the Met Life Building. (How cool would it be to work in a beautiful building...right on top of the train station! You'd never need your umbrella again!) Inside, there was a rather empty looking Swarovski shoppe. I've been collecting Swarovski crystal figurines since I married Lo Gung three years ago. (It's his go-to present. Guys, if you never know what to get your wife...help her start a collection! You'll always have a Plan B present for every Christmas, Birthday, Anniversary, Valentine's Day and Anniversary!) Anyhow, it was a very nice little shoppe, with a platter of French caramel chocolates on the counter for the taking.

My favorite part, though, was the man working there. He cracked. Me. Up. He had on his dapper suit, with his lavender-grey shirt and his grey silk tie. He had black-framed glasses, and a close, close buzzed head. But the way he talked. Oh, I kid you not - if he was in a movie, he'd be the Gay Best Friend of the Bride. I LOVED him. I kept Lo Gung in that shoppe for a good 20 minutes just so I could chat with the man. (I honestly have no idea if he was Gay or not, so I mean no disrespect.) He was chatty, he was attentive, he was buddy-buddy. He guessed that I was an alto, without my ever mentioning that I sang. When I told him no, I was a soprano, he kind of threw his hand to the side and said, "Oh, well...a lot of my Set are in the theater, so I love to try to guess these things!" He tried to sell me a pair of martini glasses for just after the baby was born. When I explained that I didn't drink, made my own bread, and attended church every Sunday, he was properly shocked and very impressed. I just loved chatting with him. When Lo Gung admitted that he bought a lot of our Swarovski collection at a warehouse store, he was properly shocked and told us that the warehouse stores sold things way under priced and sold things they never should have been able to get in the first place (limited edition pieces, etc.). (Seriously, though - someone higher up than him must have figured it was a good way to get rid of the limited edition pieces or not-as-successful pieces for a quick turn over!) As we left, my New Favorite Person in NYC told Lo Gung, "If you go to that store to get another piece of Swarovski - I'll break your legs."

Ah - parting is such sweet sorrow!

We made our way downstairs to the train station and caught the 7 out to Flushing. It is a 30 minute ride, so you have time to really settle in...and everyone gets a seat eventually, because the crowd that boards at Grand Central never all wants to go to get Chinese groceries in Queens.

This Chinatown was very different from the one in Manhattan - it was much more spread out, more like Richmond, BC than Hong Kong. (Richmond is our favorite place to go in Canada - almost everyone there is from Hong Kong, and they have some of the best pastries and buns and dim sum on the West Coast.)

We trolled through a few grocery stores, making lists for later in the night, and hit a book shoppe as well. I found a cute little set of board books for BBJ that would teach her ten really basic characters. We simply could not find children's books that weren't in "Simplified Chinese" (the characters used in Mainland China). Hong Kong uses "Traditional Chinese", with more complex characters. I think there were a lot of people from Mainland China in Flushing - the restaurants reflected a greater Chinese diversity than the usual dim sum parlors and tea shoppes in Manhattan. I suppose my first clue ought to have been when I couldn't understand 90% of what was going on around me.

Eventually we got hungry again, and went in search of Golden Shopping Mall. I had heard that they had a Food Court of sorts, in the basement, with about half a dozen "regional" Chinese cuisines represented. We had to check it out! We ended up in a little shoppe that sold specialties from Xi'An, an area of China we visited a few years ago when I was pregnant with BBJ.

Xi'An is famous for its dumplings, Terra Cotta Warriors, noodles, wheat and chilies. Actually, they're famous for a few other things, too - like sleeping on rocks, singing loudly and off key, and always shouting...but those don't have much to do with this post, or the little shoppe we found.

We ordered two noodle dishes, both "not very spicy." One was called "Leung Peih" (Liang Pi?) or "cold skin". It was thick pieces of handmade noodles, covered in chili oil, canola oil and loads of cilantro. The name comes from the "cooling effect" this dish has. (That's the red one in the picture below. The dish got hotter the more you ate, because the noodles were soaking in the chili oil.)

The name of the other dish completely escapes me, but it was more noodles with itty bitty pieces of pork meat and more chili oil than the first dish. Despite the paler color, this dish was definitely the spicier of the two.

(Oh, kids, I'm getting hungry all over again!)

(Aunt LoLo in Flushing)

Kids, we had so. much. fun. We went to a grocery store and stocked up on Japanese cookies, cheap fruits and vegetables we can't find here, mochi and some special sweet, black vinegar that I will use to make soup after Baby Boy arrives. (That's why we drove into the city - to get all our groceries home!)

We made a quick stop at an (overpriced!) tea parlor for Bubble Fruit Smoothies, took the subway back to Grand Central and then began our long drive home. We arrived around 9:30 to find SheShe and her husband in the basement watching movies, BBJ fed, clothed, and asleep in her bed and our home looking like everyone had had a great time and BBJ had completely taken advantage of SheShe's long temper. (I'm still finding things all over the house that I'm sure BBJ tried to convince SheShe were toys.)

So, that was our anniversary day! Lots of food, some shopping...and 10 1/2 hours of alone time with my sweet husband of three years! Today is our real anniversary, but Saturday gave us a lot more time together than we could have had today!