Family Fun

So two weeks in and we've already had two visits from family back home! Dan was in town for business Monday through Wednesday. He showed us a good time down in Soho at a Cuban restaurant called Cafe Habana. Good food, good friends, good times. Dan was also privileged enough to be our first Cleveland visitor to witness our Manhattan apartment. On the outside he said "it is very nice" and on the inside he said "I can't believe you live in this tiny cell."
So if a brother-in-law wasn't enough of a home-sickness cure, how about PARENTS?!?! That's right folks, even after putting up with hauling all our stuff around and helping on our house, my parents actually wanted to see us again SO much, that they were willing to drive 450 miles, pay a premium for a hotel in the projects, and traipse around the shoulder-knocking streets of New York to see us again. And did they traipse! We covered miles and miles of Manhattan streets to cover dozens of NYC tourist attractions. Who needs a double-decker bus. So let's get to a few things of note from the weekend...

Brooklyn Bridge:

Nice walk, pretty bridge, yadda yadda yadda, now check this out - near the middle of the bridge I saw all these locks on various little hooks on the bridge. So I took a picture, then got home and googled it and found out they are "love locks" where two love birds write their names on the lock, lock it to the bridge and throw the key into the river. Here's the first picture I found (keep in mind there are dozens of these things:

Flickr of love locks

Then I looked closer at mind and I see the same lock, but it is BURIED by other locks.

This appears to be a major problem. The number of locks is growing at an unsustainable rate. Brooklyn is going to either need to start cutting locks off (dooming the relationships of many romantics), or there will no longer be room for any new romance in the future! I personally recommend they begin to add more hooks to the bridge.

The Met:

AKA the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was cool. I would say if you had to choose between this and the dead stuff museum I would choose the Met.
Side note for those of you not familiar with search engine crawlers. The above link is actually one small step towards teaching google that a search for dead stuff museum should take you to the American Museum of Natural History website. Hilarious.
So we saw lots of cool stuff. The museum was beautiful (see below)

They had lots of famous paintings (see below)

Musical instruments... I got to learn about the modifications typically made to old Stradivarius violins when they are used in modern day orchestras (see original and modified below).

And finally the most relevant statue to today's society... I couldn't believe this... the lady texting!!

One last random story

Most of you will probably admit, it's hard to find a restaurant that pleases a mother, father, son, daughter in-law, mother-in-law, father-in-law, 2 husbands, and 2 wives. Sounds like 10 people, actually 4 people, feels like 10 people. So, many meals through, we were trying to find the perfect meal Sunday night to wrap up the weekend. And oh was it the coup de grâce. We ended up walking MILES (literally) in pouring rain (literally) in our Easter Sunday best (literally) to finally settle for some overpriced Italian restaurant no one wanted. So I pretended I was sick (sort of) and we left after having some free bread and water, and trudged through more rain to finally find an acceptable Japanese restaurant. I actually don't know if this was ok with the rest of the fam, but I was so worked up at that point I don't think anyone would have complained. So 2 minutes after we sat down, our server brought us small plates for appetizers and winged my plate at the table in front of me, breaking the plate and sending plate pieces and small porcelain shards all over my lap. Thanks dude, there's a first time for everything I guess.

Oh yeah one last shout out to the dude wearing the Easter Bonnet