Location: New York City, NY, USA

We woke up this morning once again ready for a busy day in New York. Our first stop was a breakfast place in Chelsea called Le Pain Quotidien that we had passed by yesterday. We spent a long time sitting by the sunny window, chatting away about highlights of our previous travels and what we look forward to most in future ones. The smell of fresh bread wafted around us, which was a really nice change from the dumpster fire smell of the rest of the city.

Since breakfast was near the Chelsea market we meandered through to grab coffee, admiring once again the cool architecture of the factory/train station turned marketplace. We hopped up a few flights of stairs and wound up back at the High Line train track garden, and decided to walk the whole length today as we only walked half of it yesterday and it ended near a train station we wanted to be at.

A 4 km walk and 9 train stops later we found ourselves at Levain Bakery, where I had heard they sell ginormous cookies. um yes please. I was still surprised that my double chocolate cookie was as big as it was, definitely the largest cookie I’ve ever had and so tasty. Would highly reccomend Levain. We strolled over to Morningside park and found cute little Tiffany blue picnic tables where we hunkered down for an hour while Katisse read her book and I caught up on my blogging from the day before. New York is so busy and there’s no hour of the day that feels like the right hour to blog, since something is always happening.

After this we walked up further north from the park into the heart of Harlem, which felt like stepping into another city entirely. I couldn’t quite place the feeling I was experiencing, until chatting about it with Kat we realized that I have not really been anywhere where I was the minority and was aware of it. I wasn’t uncomfortable with this, it was just an odd thing to notice and definitely provoked some conversation between us about checking our own privilege and what it meant to grow up in the majority. I’ve had these conversations before but it’s never been like this.

We hopped the train back home to dress up a bit for the evening ahead. Kats birthday is only a month away so I decided to celebrate early and bought us tickets for a broadway showing of ‘Wicked.’ I was very excited but I also at this point starving since I’d eaten literally just a large cookie for lunch. I mean I’m totally okay with that but real food was definitely in order.

Another train ride later and we were back to Times Square to go to City Kitchen, a cafeteria like space that serves food from 10 of the most popular restaurants in the city. We shared a lobster roll, tacos and a doughnut, before spotting a Shake Shack across the street and giddily running over there for a burger as well. I was STUFFED and definitely ready to sit in a chair for 3 hours.

WICKED. WAS. I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E. I think Kat used the word ‘gobsmacked’ a few times. Seriously it’s insanely popular so I knew it would be good but there’s no way to explain how wonderful it actually is. I had a pretty emotional reaction and ended up tearing up a few times, as did Katisse and half of the theatre. Turns out the main character, Elphaba, was played by the understudy tonight and she was so ridiculously talented I couldn’t help but wonder how the main actress could be any better. How is this woman only the understudy?! Bravo. Seriously a must-see.

For the past two days Kat has been trying to find this ice-cream shop called ‘Milk’ that makes cereal milk flavoured soft-serve ice-cream and crack-pie, which is sort of like pecan pie without the pecans. Definitely a great way to cap off another wonderfully busy day.

Bliss.

S