We actually have something to write about this time!
Mario finished his last final two weeks ago and my mom flew in for a visit the next day. Mario picked her up at the airport and brought her in to have lunch with me, so the first time she saw me was in the food court in the mall next to my office. She had to touch my belly before she could even give me a hug - the last time anyone in our family saw me I was only about 8 weeks pregnant. It's funny how pregnant bellies are so captivating - even people at work who see me every day can't stop looking at it. It took Mom a few days to get used to it, which is understandable considering I'm still not totally used to it!The first day was pretty quiet - Mario showed her around Harvard Yard and Harvard Square.
We got an airbed for her to sleep on and it took up our ENTIRE living room. We actually had to move the couches so it would fit. And it was only a queen!
Saturday morning we spent exploring a big, open-air market in downtown Boston with everything from fresh raspberries to oysters on the half-shell to freshly-baked bagels. That afternoon we walked the first part of the Freedom Trail, which is a walking tour of historic sites in Boston. We saw Paul Revere's house, the Old North Church where the lanterns were hung to begin the Revolutionary War, the graveyards where the revolutionary leaders are buried, and the meetinghouses where the Revolution got its beginnings.
We ended our tour in Boston's North End, aka Little Italy, so named because that's where the Italian immigrants started out. Now it's a beautiful part of town full of one- or two-storey red brick buildings that house endless Italian restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores. We found some ridiculously excellent cannolis and rested our aching feet as we ate dinner at La Famiglia Giorgio, a little place with a single dining room that only seats about 30 people at a time and serves home-made pasta noodles. Our waitress was a portly older woman everyone called Auntie and the food was awesome.
The next day was my birthday. Mario got up early and made me cinnamon Belgian waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. For dinner he made huge hamburgers and sweet potato fries. If you can't tell, holidays for me are all about the food!
The next morning we headed out for New York City. It took us four hours to arrive at our hotel in Queens where we dropped off our bags and hopped on the subway to Times Square. We spent the afternoon walking around mid-Manhattan. We went to the top of the Rockefeller Center where we could see the entire island of Manhattan, Grand Central Station, the Theater District, the Public Library (I know it doesn't sound very exciting, but it was a very cool building with big stone lions in front and a gorgeous park in the back), and the Chrysler Building as well as a whole lot of stuff in between. I ate a hot dog from a vending cart on the street that wasn't very good and Mario got hooked on big, soft vending cart pretzels. We found a little pizza place for dinner with deep-dish pies. It was expensive and not very good, but we had to have pizza in New York City!
The next morning we started at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was really quite impressive. The Green Lady was very beautiful and a really impressive piece of art apart from being one of the symbols of our freedom. Ellis Island was very humbling. They did an excellent job with all the displays. They had the medical and mental exam rooms for incoming immigrants set up still where they explained what they were testing for. One of the mental exams was to draw a diamond (just a square on an angle, not like a drawing of a diamond). They had to stop giving that exam because a lot of the immigrants coming through had never held a pencil before and weren't capable of drawing four straight lines even though they were perfectly mentally competent. There was an awards ceremony of some kind going on to honor the children of immigrant families. Candace Bergen was giving presentations about "Broadway" Joe Namuth and Jerry Seinfeld, both of whom were in the audience not more than 20 yards from us as we walked through the room they were in. They also had rooms with pictures, passports, ticket stubs, and stories. It was amazing. It made me thankful for my own ancestors who were brave enough to leave their lives and families to come to America and for my grandparents who have shared their stories with me, but it made me unspeakably thankful for my father-in-law. For those who don't know, Mario's dad grew up in communist Romania where his family was persecuted for their Christian beliefs in addition to other horrors that come with communism that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say he had it rough. He and his family suffered a great deal. He decided at a young age that he wanted something better than communism for his future family, and when he was 19 he risked his life to escape. I'm talking about evading guards with machine guns and dogs kind of risking his life, like something you'd see in a movie. Because of his courage, I'm married to the man of my dreams and we're starting our own family. I am proud that my children can share in that heritage, and we will be sure they know what their grandpa did for them. Ellis Island really brought home to me the kind of heart it must have taken for him to do what he did, although I know I will never truly understand the sacrifice he made so his family could have a better life than he had.
The rest of the afternoon we spent making our way back up to Times Square. We went past the stock exchange, the site of the Twin Towers, the Empire State building, Chinatown and New York's Little Italy. Chinatown was AWESOME. That's the closest we've been to China since we were in China. It even smelled like China! It was a lot of fun to walk around and remember the Motherland. Everything we saw, from the bakeries to the meat vendors (complete with pig heads and feet hanging in the windows) to the fruit stands, looked like it had been directly transplanted from a Chinese town. I even had a China experience right there in Chinatown. There was a blue post office box on a street corner - you know the kind with a little handle you pull down which opens the door so you can put in your mail. There was a Chinese guy with a letter he wanted to put in, but he couldn't figure out how the box opened. He tried sticking the letter in all the places were the metal was welded together and that (obviously) wasn't really working out so well for him. He must have walked around that thing three times trying every crease to see if that was where he could jam his letter inside. So I walked over, grabbed the handle and opened the slot for him. He gave me a very big smile of relief and put his letter inside. Poor guy. I don't know how long he would have been going around and around the box if someone hadn't helped him. I was very impressed with myself that I held back my giggles until he was far enough away not to hear. I'm sure many Chinese people had similar experiences with me when I was in their country. Chinatown and Little Italy are right next to each other - they're actually only separated by a banner hanging in the middle of a block - everything to one side is in Chinese and everything to the other is in Italian. It wasn't quite as cool of a Little Italy as we have here in Boston, and we bought more cannolis because we'd been so impressed the first time, but unfortunately they were ridiculously expensive instead of ridiculously delicious. After walking until we couldn't walk anymore once again, we found a little pub for dinner and called it a day.
Our last day in NYC we spent exploring Central Park, which was great, and a few of Manhattan's other city parks. It's really impressive to see that even when real estate there is at such a premium, they have still kept so many parks.
None of the three of us are much for cities - I don't think I had ever planned a vacation just to see a city in my life - but Manhattan wasn't like anything else I've ever seen and we all enjoyed it a great deal more than we thought we would. I would never, ever want to live there (I think I would last about a week before inescapable claustrophobia set in, no matter how many city parks there are), but it was an amazing place to see and surprisingly clean, beautiful, and interesting. It made me wish I knew a lot more about architecture so I could appreciate all the cool buildings. It was also fun to see things I've only seen in movies or on television. It was a great trip and we're hoping to go back at least once before we leave the east coast, which I certainly didn't think would be the case when we were planning our trip. We were pretty much doing it because it was one of those things we had to do while in this part of the country since we'll most likely never have the chance again, but it turned out to be really enjoyable and interesting, even for people who don't like cities.
We headed back home for a night and left the next morning on a new and completely different adventure - a road trip up the northeastern coastline. (It's too bad they don't give you stamps for going into different states like they do for countries because in the week Mom was here, we took her through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine.) We drove north along the coast of New Hampshire and Maine all the way to Canada. It was a lot of fun. We stopped in a bunch of the little seaside villages and wandered around, and we found the most amazing beach in a little town called Ogunquit. It happened to be in the 90s that day, which was really unusual for that time of year, so we got out to walk around a little. It was three miles of perfectly white sand and light blue water. It was absolutely gorgeous. The water was unbelievably, achingly cold. I'd guess it was a solid 5 degrees colder than the water off the Oregon coast, and that's pretty darn cold! On our way back to the car, we struck up a conversation with two little old ladies enjoying the day who happened to have grown up in the area, and I asked them where we should go to get the best lobster around for my dear mother visiting from the other side of the world. They said we absolutely must try the "lobstah" pie at the Maine Diner ten miles up the road, so up the road we went. We weren't disappointed! Lobster pie, aka lazy man's lobster, is a local dish of freshly cooked and shelled lobster meat that is soaked in butter and baked with a savory crumb butter topping. Mom was in heaven! We originally planned to spend the first day of our road trip on the coast and the second in inland Maine, but we were having so much fun we decided to just keep going on the coast the whole time. We made it all the way to the Quoddy Head Lighthouse, which sits on the easternmost point of the United States. We stopped on the way home at a place called Jasper Beach, which is composed entirely of red jasper stones instead of sand and is one of two such beaches in the world (the other is in Japan), which was interesting. We had dinner at a place called The Seafood Shack where Mom had more lobster. It was a great time and quite the opposite of New York - "downeast Maine," as northeastern Maine is called, is sparsely populated and has a lot of wide-open spaces, as opposed to humanity-laden Manhattan.
We spent our last day with Mom in Boston finishing the Freedom Trail. We walked A LOT while she was here, so we decided to go to the movies Saturday afternoon to give our sore feet a break. It was a somewhat ill-fated trip, although we enjoyed the movie. We went to a little supermarket to get snacks to take in with us. While we were standing in front of the cooler, a worker on a step ladder at the end of the aisle dropped a 2-liter bottle of soda. The impact caused it to fizz so much it exploded through the cap and shot like a jet-propelled rocket down the aisle where it then collided quite forcefully with my shins. The four of us just looked at each other for a second and then the worker rushed over to apologize profusely for my rapidly-bruising ankle, but we all ended up laughing. Who expects to be attacked by rogue Diet Coke in the grocery store? Then, there wasn't a parking lot at the theater, so we had to use parking meters, which wouldn't last as long as we needed. Mario gallantly volunteered to go feed the meter during the movie so we wouldn't get a ticket, and he ran the whole way so he wouldn't miss anything. The theater we went to is kind of weird - exceptionally dark and a little strange with weird statues and odd hallways. That combination, plus it being pitch-black, so disoriented Mario that in his rush to get back to his seat, he ran face-first into a wall. He came back to his seat rubbing his head and panting, which was odd, but we didn't find out until the movie was over what had happened to him.
We sent Mom on her way early Sunday morning. It was SO great to have her out to visit and we're grateful she took the time to come see us way out here!
So now we're back to our normal routine again. Mario, unfortunately, has a schedule pretty similar to (if not slightly more demanding than) his normal school schedule at the moment. He's doing research for two professors and studying to take the Patent Bar before the baby comes. Hopefully he'll be able to make it through this summer and the next school year without getting too burnt out, and without ruining his eyes completely from reading for 12 hours a day for two solid years! I'm still working (as a receptionist in a biofuels company called Verenium) and I plan to keep working until the week before Zachary/Ian is due, which means I have 7 weeks left! Hope you're all doing great!
Love,
Angie and Mario
P.S. Almost all of the pictures are Mario's and there will be more posted shortly on Angie's Facebook.