“Difficult takes a day, impossible takes a week”
After working at Safeway all through high school and college grocery stores have become somewhat of a second home to me. Helping customers pick out ripe produce, showing off my stacking skills, and helping check people out was the name of the game for the last five years for me. I have found that I need to hold myself back from comparing produce departments of other stores to ours and helping out the checker remember the produce codes. Tomatoes on the Vine.. 4664.. Broccoli… 3082… Bananas… 4011… Limes… 4040… and I could go on for an hour or so of just codes. Yikes, did I really just admit to that? Even after all of the Safeways I’ve worked at and the countless amount of times I complained about working there I do miss it sometimes. I worked with some of the coolest people at my Enumclaw, Springfield, and Portland stores and a lot of which are still some of my best friends. It is probably the social aspect of the job and the people that I miss the most, but regardless grocery stores tend to give me warm fuzzy feelings of comfort. Not sure I want to admit that either, but I’m going to roll with it.
Since I moved to the city I’ve had to completely learn a set of different chain grocery stores in the city. None of which I had heard prior to moving here- D’agostinos, Gristedes, and Food Emporium are the ones that I see on a regular basis. Yesterday we ended up stopping at an out of the ordinary store that I thought was pretty cool and worth a blog post. The location? Food Emporium which as I said is pretty typical, but not this location! It was built underneath the Queensboro Bridge and when I say built under the bridge I mean the bottom of the bridge is the store’s roof. It was so cool and all of the bridges columns went throughout the store. I mean I have seen a lot of grocery stores, but this one definitely takes the gold for the coolness award. The Grand Central of grocery stores might I dare propose? I have to say too that their produce department was pretty impressive too, which is something I don’t throw around lightly. They even had me stumped on a product I haven’t seen before, and when it comes to produce I know the ropes pretty darn well. Never in my life have I seen Brussel sprouts growing on a kind of vine or branch though.
Needless to say, I was pretty impressed with the store and the new produce discovery. Check out my photos above and check out this store for yourself!
Until next time, good night!
Weekend Wrap-Up: All Hallow’s Eve weekend in the New York promised to be a pretty eventful weekend and that it was. My first holiday celebration in the city! I’ve been anticipating the holiday for awhile because of all the fun decorated store fronts and apartment entrances. People seemed to really get into the spirit here, which is so refreshing! In about the last 5 years of my life I feel as though decorations for holidays have dwindled more and more each year. As our lives become busier it seems as though the holidays sneak up on us and less people take the time to get in the spirit of everything. That wasn’t the case this year though and I can only await for what is going to come for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We ended up deciding on going out to Mars2112 for their Halloween party, which is located down in Time’s Square. The warm weather we have been having has finally turned into Fall, which wasn’t exactly ideal for waiting outside for half an hour before making it into the club! We survived though. Mars2112 is kind of a touristy restaurant during the day. I’ve heard you take a “ride” (maybe in a simulator?) before you make it to your table on Mars. They skipped the ride for the Halloween party, but the venue was pretty cool. The hallways kind of resemble caves with red rock walls that resemble Mars. I’m not sure what it is like there on a normal weekend, but I definitely think it was a good choice for Halloween. The only downfall? $40 cover.. Welcome to New York! That was actually one of the cheaper options too if you can believe that. Note to self, if you’re going to go out on a holiday in New York plan ahead. There are some websites that let you buy tickets in advanced for clubs at discounted prices.
It wouldn’t have been such a bad deal if we had gotten there earlier because almost every bar had an hour open bar included in cover. Because it took so long to get into the door though we missed out on that option. Instead? $12 well drinks.. with $50 minimums on a debit card. None of which I ended up doing, but just to let you know of the craziness. Something else that is new to me is bottle service. I guess you can buy tables at clubs where you can buy bottles of alcohol that usually start off at $150. All of it seems pretty crazy to me.. but I’m surprised by the amount of people that do it. Personally, I have bills to pay rather than $150 on a bottle of alcohol, but that is the madness that is New York. Anyways, the club was not hurting for money on Saturday night I can tell you that much. My roommate had a friend in town from Florida and then we ended up meeting up with a couple more friends there so it was a fun night. They had a huge dance floor too so we danced the night away! Above, you can see a close up of my vampire teeth and blood, a couple of us girls, and a very blurry photo of the dance floor.
On Sunday it was officially Halloween and I wasn’t going to rock my Vampire costume again, but decided it was a perfectly great day to deck myself out in all of my duck gear after an amazing take down of USC the night before (Back to number 1 baby!!). So that is what I did! I wasn’t the only one dressing up though.. Chris dropped by to drop off Scooter’s Halloween costume of Batman! See the picture in my previous posting. He was too cute! He didn’t completely love the actual body part, but wore the cape and hat all day long. Everyone at the dog park thought he was adorable too so mission accomplished! After putting my dog through misery I left him to be his lazy self for the day and headed to Shake Shack for pre-game burgers with Donna. I mentioned Shake Shack in a previous post, but it is worth mentioning again because it makes your taste buds very happy. Sunday’s poison? Shack Stack burger, fries and lemonade. Let me just tell you about the Shack Stack because it is like no other burger I have ever had. Let’s be honest now too, I’ve eaten a lot of burgers. They are my first love in life. Anyways, think burger with a portobello mushroom burger on top stuffed with muenster and cheddar cheese. Pure amazing. That is the only word to describe it. If you’re in New York, put it on your bucket list.
After our food was finished and we felt like we were going to combust (side effect of trying to eat too much deliciousness) we headed back to watch my first Jets Football game. After trying to be swayed to different teams by some of my new friends I’ve decided for now I’m going to side with the Jets over the Giants. Partly I must admit because their colors are green and white which is half of the duck’s colors.. Great reasoning? I think so. The game ended up being a pretty big bust 9-0 with not a single touchdown scored, but it was still a good time.
To wrap-up the weekend I headed down to the Halloween Parade in the West Village with a couple of friends. The parade was pretty hyped up in the press, but my friends and I weren’t completely impressed. Boy, do a lot of people go though! That was probably most of the reason we weren’t too impressed considering you can’t see much when you are in a huddle about 10 rows back behind other people. I got one semi-blurry photo for you guys to check out. I’m glad we went, but if I wanted to check it out again I will probably watch it with front row seats on my couch. My friends that didn’t actually go to the parade ended up actually seeing more of it than I did. People are definitely into it though! Not only are there millions of people, but most of them are all in costume and join into the parade as it’s going too. If Halloween would have fallen on a Saturday the parade might have been a little bit more fun, but since my friends and I celebrated Saturday night and didn’t dress up to the parade it ended up not being too impressive. Trying to get home was tough though! I want to go to the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving parade, but I can only imagine the mess that is that parade!
All and all, the weekend was fabulous, we made some new friends, had a great time celebrating the holiday and tried new things!