New York, New York

We wanted to make a trip to New York and the Columbus Day weekend made for a good opportunity. The cheapest way to get to NYC is by riding one of the many buses that run from Chinatown in DC to Chinatown in Manhattan. These buses started out several years ago mainly to transport Chinese immigrants between cities on the East Coast, but now everyone uses them and they have pretty good reputations...other than the stories about them being run by the Chinese mob.

We stayed with our friends, Karen and Steve, so that allowed us to spend money on more fun things. We ate at the best Greek restaurant we've ever found, including when I lived in Greece. It's called Pylos and we highly recommend it if you're ever craving Greek food and are in the East Village.

We also did a pizza comparison test between two New York institutions - Lombardi's and Grimaldi's. We'd eaten at Lombardi's on previous trips since it's in Little Italy. Grimaldi's is a little harder to get to since it's under the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn, but a friend highly recommended it. Lombardi's is really good, but Grimaldi's wins hands down!

On our last night, we saw Next to Normal and had great seats in the third row. It was a great show with really catchy music that I enjoyed more than the previous musicals we'd seen.

We hadn't planned to see any tourist sites, but we decided to go to the top of Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art on a whim. We had amazing weather and the views were great. I really enjoyed some of the pre-1940s stuff at the MoMA, but I guess we really just don't get modern art. The newer stuff was just weird.

Oh yeah, and while we were eating a giant sandwich from Carnegie Deli in Rockefeller Plaza, we saw the guy who plays Kenneth from 30 Rock walk right in front of us. Hillary waved to him and he hesitated to try and decide if he knew us...then he smiled and kept walking.