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Naturally, thanksgiving marked the official start to the holiday seasons and the countdown to the end of the year.
The trees are drizzled with fairy lights and every store is trying their best to lure everyone in with huge savings (or so they claim) and generally encouraging spending beyond a sane level.
Now NY is pretty much populated all year around, but it seems as the holidays (yes, for political correctness, we are not allow to say Christmas, or rather, you have to also include Hanukkah, and other religious holidays around this time of the year) drew near, it just seems to get more and more congested on the streets, in the subway, in the line to the cashier in the shops.
Christmas markets have been setup around town in various parks. Merchandises range from the usual home ware, jewelry, clothing to very imaginative art and hand crafts.
A couple of weekends ago, I went to the markets at Union Square and Bryant Park and they were a lot of fun to see and let me tell you, every place has its own real Christmas tree, all decked out with fairy lights and fantastic decorations.
That’s another thing – it is actually common to find people buying a real pine tree to put up at home. I don’t know what the art of choosing the right tree is, but I know it is a big deal when it comes to choosing the tree to go up in front of the Rockefeller Center. Apparently every year, helicopters fly all over the country and they select “the tree” from someone’s backyard (well in reality I think it is more likely from a tree farm of sort) and ship it from where ever it is all the way back to NY to hoist up in front of the Rockefeller Center.
After spending Christmas in shorts and t-shirts for so many years, I thought I would get a White Christmas this time, but NY is actually not all that cold at the moment and we hadn’t had any snow so far. At least it is winter and I can put on my scarf and coat and order a steamy hot cup of gingerbread latte at Starbucks (not the best tasting coffee in the world but it will do).
The last 2 months came and gone in a flash! Can’t believe it is almost the end of the year?!?
After spending 2 weeks back home in Australia, I came back to NY, just at the end of Autumn and experienced Thanksgiving first hand.
It is certainly a much bigger affair than Christmas makes out to be here (well little kids may argue otherwise on that point, but if I go with the amount of vacation days you get, Thanksgiving definitely seems more celebrated). This is also how I experienced what is called “Black Friday” shopping.
Black Friday is the day that follows Thanksgiving, which is always the last Thursday in November. From the sounds of it, serious shoppers plan towards this specific Friday to do all their bargain hunting. This is the equivalent of our Myer Stocktaking sales after Christmas, only much MUCH more spectacular and crazy!!
Usually there are items available for 30% of its usual price (or less) and whilst most shops open up at around 5am in the morning, this year the famous Woodbury Common outlet opened from midnight. I heard that by 5am, the shops were looking decidedly more like stalls at a local flea market and it takes upwards of 1.5hrs to get through the line to the cashier!I did get up at 5am and did go to a shop to see what the fuss was all about and I found that there were techniques to this Black Friday shopping – Just like the Myer stocktake sales, it is all advertisement, the store probably carries like 3 of those 90% off items where you have to fight the other 50 people in the line for; and the bargain items are usually not stocked up on shelves but left at front table near the cashier. Whilst I didn’t manage to get what I wanted getting up at 5am, persistent also helped. It seems that certain stores, more hidden and less frequent would be a bargain hunter’s best bet, especially for chain store. I was after this external storage and when it was sold out everywhere else I visited in Queens and downtown Manhattan, I ended up finding 3 available in a branch of that store in midtown, possibly forgotten by most as it is between some office buildings with some scaffolding work in front of it. Yeessssssss!
Bonjour everyone. Ca va?
Ok, that's about all I can remember from my high-school French lessons ~ Oh well. Why am I suddenly speaking French? Well, it has to do with this chocolate shop - La Maison du Chocolat.
I was out shopping with a friend about 2 weekends ago, and happened to walk by this classy (and expensive) looking chocolate shop near the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. She exclaimed "Oooooooh!! We should go in and have a look!" Hey it was chocolate, I'd never say no. And THAT was the beginning of my adventure into the fine arts of chocolate.
I am not going to kid you or myself - it was damn expensive chocolate there. On the otherhand, each piece was like a master piece. There were no fancy gimicky prints on the chocolate, the packaging was simple (basically the entire shop was brown, brown and brown, just like chocolate). There was however a certain elegance about the setup. We bought some truffles and wow they were goooood. The whole thing melted in my mouth with a silkiness that is hard to describe.
So while we were making the purchase, I noticed that they actually hold chocolate appreciation classes. The Tamanaco class (journey in the world of chocolate) cost $55 for a 1.5hr session.[At this point, I will forgive you for saying: OH NO you DIDN'T... because yes I certainly did]
I left my name with them and they did call me up, and no one was mad enough to go spend $55 US on a chocolate class with me, so I went along by myself. I figured I gotta try it at least before I judged it.
I got there and was greeted by a shop staff who let me to a table and provided me with a cup of hot chocolate. One sip and I was thinking: hmm, no problem - I think it is going to be fine.
We started off the class a brief history of the shop, and the who, what, where and how La Maison du Chocolat selects their cocao beans and eventually make them into couverture (translated: large block of chocolate used to make chocolate bonbons and pastries).
Every now and then, at the relevant points, we got to sample one of their chocolate pieces. We went through a milk chocolate pastille, a 56% dark chocolate pastille and then a 65% dark chocolate pastille. You might think me silly, but oh boy, you could actually TASTE the difference in the quality of that chocolate.
Now that we had the basics completed, we went onto the ganache, which La Maison du Chocolat was famous for.
We sampled a milk-chocolate ganache (I forgot the name of it), the Guayaquil (a dark and bitter sweet ganache with a hint of vanilla), and then the Caracas (a really creamy dark chocolate ganache). What I noticed the most was, while the chocolate was melting away in my mouth against my palate, it was absolutely smooth, no lumps no powdery feel or bitterness and there were no after tastes of any sort once the chocolate was consumed. We also tried the Garrigue, a dark chocolate ganache infused with fennel (for those of you who don't know what fennel tastes like, think aniseed or liquorice). I am not a big fan of that flavour personally, but this ganache I didn't actually mind. It almost tasted somewhat like a really ripe berry and the flavour was very subtle.
But the best part was yet to come - the presenter made fresh lemon infused ganache for us right there!! We all got a cup of it to eat/drink (it was like a thick chocolate soup, with a wonderful aroma of lemon filling up the room as he stirred the cream into the chopped up couverture). The taste was unbelievable - I wish I could bottle the leftovers and take it all home!!
Well - that is the end of me eating junk chocolate - the hershey's bars are going straight to the bin.
But I have to add - I think the hot chocolate on offer at Koko Black in Melbourne is still slightly ahead of the one I tasted in La Maison du Chocolat (it is my personal opinion, but I think maybe the koko Black one has more fat in the cream they use so it feels even more velvety). Anyway I hope the standard at KKB hasn't dropped since I last went there!! I am going to verify this as soon as I get home! hee hee hee
After much anticipation, I finally went to my first baseball game. It wasn't in New York, it was in St Louis actually.As the wrap-up activity for the project I was working on in St Louis, we went to the game of St. Louis Cardinal vs Florida Marlin (thanks guys, I really appreciate you taking me there, and getting me the right-colored gear so I would blend in with the home crowd!!). 
So not only did I finally get to experience the ball game atmosphere (ie. the overpriced nachos and Bud Light on draft and the roar of the home crowd cheering), I also had my own personal baseball "intepreter" explaining to me the finer points of watching baseball, what all those numbers on the board acutally meant, and the expected behavior of cheering the team on and participating in mexican waves. It was a lot of fun (especially when the fireworks go off for home-runs).
The game was slow to start with, and things were not moving until the bottom half of the 8th inning when finally, the Cardinals hit a few to load up the bases and then a home run to bring it all home (I am sure if they didn't win, there would have been a riot in the stadium). Maybe I can enjoy it even more the next time around now that I have a little more understanding of the significants of what all the numbers on the board means (I was too distracted by the photo opps, as per usual...).
