playing too much
and i promised this would be more than just a travel blog :/
After all that fanfare last time, I am here to report back on my lovely 10-day trip to the east coast, where I pouted and wished I’d decided to go into debt as an undergrad at a brick-and-ivy liberal arts school about a dozen times. On the upside, I saw some of my favorite people ever, and got to bask in gratitude to have known them for so long and treasure their friendship :)
If you know me well, odds are you know my best friend Anna, famed USC graduate, Drexel medical student, and yapper. I love her so dearly, and in the last half decade I have visited her in LA, North Carolina, New York, Iowa City, and now Philadelphia! She’s such an excellent host because she tries really hard to be enmeshed in her community and in-the-know about festivals and events and the best boba shops, lunch deals, happy hours, and fancy restaurants in whatever city she lives in. I made her buy groceries one of the first days so we could cook at home and save some money, but she has enough recommendations that we really could’ve gone out every night somewhere life-changing.
This trip was a little different from other times I’ve visited her, because we both were working weekdays (her at a public health internship and me at my company’s office near City Hall), so it was almost like we were roommates for eight days. We kept doing this bit where we’d say which sitcom we were like, highlights including:
We’re like Friends but if it was set in Philly instead of New York and it was only two people
We’re like New Girl but if it was set in Philly instead of LA and it was only two people
We’re like Gilmore Girls but if it was set in Philly and they weren’t related
We’re like Ginny and Georgia but if it was set in Philly and they weren’t related and neither of us have murdered anyone
Anna did get Juneteenth off, so I took PTO to fly in that day, and we hit all the Philly tourism hotspots as quickly as possible. We had excellent soup dumplings and matcha soft serve in Chinatown, meandered to the Liberty Bell, and learned all about its allegedly “real” status. Despite the Mitski song, the bell is actually (kind of) the original— it’s been cracked twice, and they’ve repaired it both times by melting down the original metal and strengthening it with added alloys. It’s an interesting Ship of Theseus question. Also, apparently people made pilgrimages to see the Liberty Bell, and collect Liberty Bell merch and stuff. She’s a celebrity.
Then we walked through the Liberty Hall gift shop, and since we’d just seen centuries of Liberty Bell merchandise on display, I felt compelled to buy a Liberty Bell cookie cutter. We also walked through the Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest residential street in America, where people are still living in these 1720s townhouses, and yearned for a car-free past and pondered the societal value of such intensive historical preservation.
We speed-ran a look at the Delaware River, a single chocolate from Shane’s Confectionary, and then took the hella convenient SEPTA subway-surface trolley back to Anna’s place, where we watched the severe thunderstorm blowing in on the weather channel because that was the only thing that worked on her so-called ‘smart’ TV.
On Friday I worked a little, we got groceries (I proposed a dichotomy of personalities, Trader Joes people versus Aldi people), and I met some of Anna’s med school friends at a tea shop opening which was frickin incredible. We went to the Friday night Philadelphia Museum of Art event, featuring atmospheric DJ and overpriced drinks, and really dug the art museum.
I can’t usually articulate why I like art museums, but this one was just so well-organized from exhibit to exhibit— not just by time period/style like most museums, but by themes and overall curation of a mood/vibe. There were also a lot of things that made me giggle here, like all the people running up and down the stairs outside near the Rocky statue, or the painting the Nelson-Atkins art museum in Kansas City wagered before the Super Bowl last year that now hangs in Philly (go birds).
On Saturday, we took NJ Transit out to Atlantic City to chill on the 100 degree beach for about an hour and then lose some moneyyyyyy. Honestly, this was an iconic trip. Gambling is really not meant for my mathematical, rational brain, but Anna hyped me up when I won and then lose the same $5 like two or three times in Caesar’s Palace #BringBackPennySlotMachines. The iconic part of this trip was honestly when we went to the Atlantic City Tanger Outlets, found clearance Kate Spade bags that suited each other, and bought them as gifts to each other to justify the purchase. Treat yo friends!! We finished the day off by sharing a bucket cocktail at Applebee’s and reading the paperbacks we brought with our new bags, which probably seemed so cool and mysterious to everyone else in the restaurant.
When we got home that night, Anna’s mom called her and let her know she should be studying for her Step 1 exam next February, and that she was ‘playing too much’, which is a phrase I adore and repeated every time we did anything fun the rest of the week. Honestly, med school is a crazy difficult thing full of crazy difficult people (and a handful of really wonderful ones), so I think Anna deserves to play before the next seven years of her schooling/clinical rotations/residency whisk her away!! So I guess this post is my ode to playing too much :)
Sunday morning we went to Parc in Rittenhouse Square for fancy French brunch, then my new favorite coffee shop, the Capital One Cafe. The Capital One Cafe
We spent Sunday afternoon in South Philly at a rooftop bar on top of a converted elementary school at a queer line dancing event, which was so fun and joyful despite the heat. I really want to find an equivalent of this in the Twin Cities, because I love a dance with instructions!!!
The rest of the week Anna and I were both working, and we got to commute and meet up for errands downtown and attend the city-wide Wednesday night happy hour “sips”, and it was just delightful. I really really love Philly. It’s definitely like a less expensive, friendlier, easier-to-get-around New York. Wawa is a national treasure. La Columbe draft lattes are a brilliant innovation of efficiency. Cheesesteak is lowkey like. Fine. But overall I was very impressed with the livability and the people and the amenities, if you can stand me talking about the cities I visit like this. Go birds for real. And bless Anna for hosting me for so long and giving me the greatest introduction.
Sadly, I had to leave Friday to get to Washington DC for my great aunt and uncle’s (John and Nancy’s) vow renewal ceremony, but happily, I got to take the Acela there. I am sooooooo obsessed with Amtrak in the northeast— would you believe you can just show up to the train station 20 minutes before your departure time, no TSA, board the train, sit in a comfy spacious chair, never have to present an ID to anyone, absorb the pastoral landscapes of Delaware and Maryland, and arrive at your final destination in two hours???? It’s just so chic. And if you thought airports were cool liminal spaces, you gotta visit a train station.
Washington DC, as always, was gorgeous. I have actually been here four times in the last three years as well— two conferences and two visits to my friend Nicole— and it’s just always treated me well, though it does drain my wallet a bit every time. The DC metro has got to be top five metros for me, and the architecture and urban design is just classic.
Nicole was so wonderful to host me again, and after the last time I visited her and we watched like twelve hours of Gilmore Girls in a weekend, I was excited to watch as much Gilded Age as humanly possible with her. She was a history major, and we are both in our New York Gilded Age historical obsession era (she read the Vanderbilt and Astor books with me), so this was just a joy. I had gotten the first season of Gilded Age on DVD from the library two days before my flight to Philly, and I’d devoured it in two nights, so Nicole was so nice to recap blurry plot points for me and explain which characters were real historical figures and which were fictional.
My first night in her Dupont Circle neighborhood, we got fancy dinner from the oyster bar where one of her six (6) roommates works at my insistence since she let me stay with her again. This was my second time trying oysters (the first was also in DC, with a random hostel friend) and they were actually so much better this time. I love a splurge meal so bad. In another life, I would be a DC liberal with severe lifestyle creep.
On Saturday morning I had to sneak out to the three-hour private Capitol tour my great uncle arranged from a seasoned docent. The tour was pretty detailed and weirdly emotional at times. The “big beautiful bill” was being deliberated in the senate later that day, so there was a lot of discussion of democracy and the history of the different branches of government, and the docent, who’d worked at USAID for twenty years before this job, was definitely having a tough time. Still, very interesting and informative, and new to me since I never did the middle school DC trip everyone seems to do.
After the tour, my fam split off to go to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, which is so definitely overrated. I became obsessed with Owney, the stray dog that wandered into a New York post office and became the 1890s mascot of the postal service, traveling on trains and steamboats around the world to help deliver the mail. Then I met taxidermy Owney, in the (preserved) flesh. Victorians were so strange.
Saturday night Nicole and I and the fam had a lot of delicious snacky foods and wine to celebrate John and Nancy’s 25th wedding anniversary, and Sunday morning we attended their vow renewal ceremony, which was so beautiful. I got a special shout-out for being the youngest person at their wedding 25 years prior, as a six month old baby. My mom got a kick out of saying, “even then, she was a good traveler”.
I might reflect on ‘traveler’ as an identity some more at a later date. At a different point on this trip, my mom was following my instructions for the metro, and she remarked something like “remember when you were so shy and scared as a kid, and look at you now” and honestly, I am still pretty shy and scared. I think I just like the challenge of figuring out how to get from one place to the next?
Anyway, I am so exhausted as I write this, because I accidentally got an extra night seeing monuments with the family because my flight home last night was overbooked by 20 people! Crazy work!
I got bumped to an early Monday morning flight with the consolation of a huge Visa gift card, which is actually gambling I can get behind: if you show up at the airport, you will either get on the plane or win enough money to cover your entire trip. I sort of hoped it would happen again on my 6 AM flight, but alas I did get back to Minneapolis safe and sound in time for work. Let’s wrap it up.
What I’ve Been Chewing On:
Music: Virgin by Lorde x10. Perfect album no notes. I cried on the train, I cried on the plane, it’s some Dr Seuss magic. ‘GRWM’ is my current favorite, also obsessed with Shapeshifter, Broken Glass, David…. honestly many devastating songs on this album this is your warning.
Random summer teen drama TV: Anna and I watched ‘We Were Liars’ and it made me so crazy omg. Ginny and Georgia season 3 was also so dramatic and delicious, I really hope it’s going to be a cult classic.
Cities Skylines. I guess I am in the right field because after a long day of traffic modeling I want to go home and do more traffic modeling, basically.
THE BEAR SEASON 4! Streets were saying it was underwhelming, but I loved the ‘reduction’ and return to form. The finale especially was so delightful— spoilers-ish but it’s basically just the main trio of Syd, Richie, Carmy in a single shot 30-minute conversation in the restaurant’s back alley, and I truly loved that choice. Catch me on AO3 the rest of this week reading fic of any combination of those three characters. I am so weird for this, but in any good character-driven show I find a throuple to root for :)
I started getting my community-supported agriculture produce!! I’m so excited to figure out new ways to use up veggies, herbs, etc.
What are you chewing on???