Birthday in the City

This past Sunday was J’s 26^th birthday and we decided to go to NYC to celebrate.  J and I are pretty familiar with the city and I’d have to say it is one of the biggest reasons we miss living more upstate because we used to live 10 minutes from the station and could hop right on a train for a day trip.  Now it takes a 40-minute car ride just to get to the station and then about an hour and 15 minutes (if you are lucky enough to get an express!) to get to the city from our new station.

Anyway, we go into the city around 11 and made our way to the TKTS booth in Times Square.  Many people groan about how all the tourists go to Times Square, but I could care less if I’m going to pay almost half of what the normal cost is for theater tickets.  We decided to go see Blue Man Group since it was different from our normal (Last time we saw How to Succeed in Business with Daniel Radcliffe.   It was fantastic).

We had about 2.5 hours to kill until show time so we headed towards Rockefeller Plaza to walk through the NHL store.  J was hoping to find some ice hockey supplies there, but was sadden to find out it was mostly expensive NHL team jerseys and other merchandise.

Since the show was all the way down in the Village, J and I jumped on a train and headed downtown thinking we’d kill time down there.  We ended up grabbing some lunch at Soup N’ Burger: I got a turkey club and J had a bacon cheeseburger.  We still had time to kill so we walked around the area and found these crazy zip-tied stoplights and lampposts.

The show was definitely an interesting experience, especially since I had no idea what to expect.  There was a lot of music, paint splattering, audience participation and creepy blue man stares!  Overall we both liked it, but I just wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who hasn’t seen a show in the city, there are so many other really great choices for show to see.

We wandered around for a bit longer and actually had to look for another subway entrance because the train we wanted to take was not operating from the street we wanted to take it at.  Luckily in this area you really only need to walk a handful of blocks to find another subway entrance.  We went back uptown to see if we could find another hockey store that J wanted to go to, but unfortunately it was closed.

Since we couldn’t think of anything else we wanted to do, J and I checked the train schedule and were lucky enough to not only find a train leaving in twenty minutes, but also one that was an express!  We played back and forth games of Dice with Friends on J’s phone before he fell asleep.

We grabbed some Qdoba for dinner on the way home, J’s favorite East Coast Mexican food place (he loves Del Taco back in California).  Afterwards I lit up the candles on the small ice cream cake that I got him (tradition for us) and we dug into with just forks (no need to dirty any plates up!).   We spent the rest of the night relaxing (other than me preparing some meals for work this week) and groaning about eating too much food!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY J! Love you!