A Different World

This weekend I spent a couple of great days in New York. It's always nice to get to the big city for a while. Aside from the standard bit of shopping I need to do every time I get out of town, this time I got to visit with some old friends I haven't seen in nearly a year. It was quite an international weekend. One of the things I love about New York is how international it is. Even just walking down the street you hear all kinds of languages: French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, you name it. Saturday night we went out to a birthday party for a friend of my friend Sara, who is Swedish. It was definitely the tallest, blondest and most fashionable group of people I've hung out with in a long time. Sunday morning, we went out for a delicious breakfast at a Latin American place with dishes from at least five different countries. Huevos rancheros, a pineapple-mango shake, and cafe con leche...yum!

After a quick afternoon visit with Alison, Basil and Henry, I caught the Chinatown Bus back home (yes, really). It's a quick trip, only four hours. The bus was pretty empty so after we left the city I stretched out across a couple of seats for a nap. I slept for a couple of hours. When I woke up, it was dark outside and with a few dim lights on inside the bus, it was hard to see out the windows. However, it slowly dawned on me that the silhouettes I saw outside were trees...snow-covered trees! While I was gone about 3-6 inches of snow fell in central PA. Right about when I figured this out, we passed a country road alongside the highway, and I saw two horse-drawn carriages go by--we were in Amish country. Just a few hours outside the city, I had arrived in another universe.