It's taken me a good while - but I finally made it out to the US this past week. Although this trip was largely a work-business related trip, we still managed to do a lot of touristy things, which is pretty great.
So here's my brief 8 days in the US.
Day 1: Streets of Philadelphia
After landing in to Newark Airport, my colleague and I headed in to Philadelphia, where we were met by another colleague. He took us on a great drive through the city in to Glenside, which is a town just outside of Philly. The drive consisted of taking us through a variety of towns and streets - such as through the very dodgy Mount Airy, which was just like something out of a thuggish movie. It was scary, and I rolled up my windows so I didn't seem so foreignly scared. The weather was absolutely wonderful - sunny, hot and completely gorgeous!
Needless to say, I was pretty exhausted, what with the sudden time change. I kept telling everyone how weird it was that I had to put my watch back 5 hours, and how I relived those hours again. It was a concept I was totally in awe with. Clearly! All my travels in the past few years have always been in similar time zones, or ones that were ahead. This was going backwards. Anyway, after the journey to Glenside, came our welcoming in to the Office, which was so lovely! They had a welcome sign up for us, and it was so sweet. We met a couple of my colleagues, and then headed to the apartment to just freshen up and drop off our luggage. Once at the apartment - which by the way was really well laid out - and we had so much space just between the two of us - I really felt the jet lag and tiredness kick in. That evening, we had dinner with a couple of colleagues - we went out to a Japanese Hibachi restaurant. It was pretty exciting for someone who was fresh out of a 7 hour flight and looked like death. There was an exciting display of fire, and fast chopping that was accompanied with a funny Japanese chef. It was great, and the sushi was gorgeous! The only thing that surprised me a lot was how much Coke Americans drink. They drink it like it's water - with constant refills. It's actually pretty nauseating.
After failing to catch a hot shrimp thrown at me by the Japanese chef, we decided to call it an early night and head back to sleep.
Day 2: Summertime
I woke up very early on Saturday morning. I did however manage to watch about 3 hours of non-stop American TV, which was both traumatic and great. Great because I watched re-runs of The Nanny, which was a favourite growing up - and traumatic because of how openly they advocate the taking of Anti-Depressants and other very harmful medication during TV advert breaks. For someone who is totally against medication as a whole, forget anti-depressants, I absolutely dislike taking Paracetamol even - this was the worst thing I could see on TV. To think that masses of people in America are drugged by such harmful medications, because they feel it is the right way out of their pain/mental health instabilities. It's completely worrying.
After the initial jet lag wore off, we headed to work for the second half of the day - as there was an Event we had to be a part of. It was pretty exciting - and I will leave out all details pertaining to work, for confidential reasons of course.
After work, eating a Pretzel with MUSTARD (so strange!) and having some "Water Ice" - which is a fancy word for extra sweetened and artificially flavoured Slush - another colleague of mine was sweet enough to take us out to the second biggest shopping centre in America or the World, I can't remember - King of Prussia Mall. It was nothing too special to me, seeing as I grew up in Dubai - and well, big shopping complexes were a part of all of that. It was nice however, to see shops like Macy's, Bloomingdales and of course my favourite - Bath and Body Works!
The day ended with some yummy food - a yummy pizza. And by this point I was convinced that portion sizes in the US - were in fact, ginormous. I couldn't possibly eat anything for days after eating a couple of the slices, and it was apparent that it was the norm to take left overs home in a doggy bag - a concept here, that isn't as usual.
Day 3: "It's the Eye of the Tiger, it's the thrill of the fight"
Sunday was our day off - thankfully! It was about 30-35 degrees Celsius, and absolutely hot. We spent the day in Philadelphia, and walked around the ENTIRE city - managing to see everything we set out to visit.
We saw the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Benjamin Franklin's statue, The Art Museum (yes, we did the whole Rocky thing too!), Old City Hall and even went down to 16th Street to do some shopping. By the end of the day though, we were all so shattered - the heat didn't do us well, and the food was just, as previously stated - massive.
We ate lunch at a small but quirky open-top restaurant. It was like something out of Camden, and had great decor. The only thing I started to suspect was - how much corn they put in food. And believe me when I say, they put corn (white, yellow - flour, whole, crushed, all sorts of ways) in all kinds of food I ate. So pretty much, everything. It started getting a little sickening after that day, I have to admit. It was hard to digest food beyond this.
Day 4: Philly, Philly!
Monday was pretty intense, as it was a start of the working week - and I had quite a few presentations to be a part of, as well as some meetings. There was a lot of information, so the highlights of the day were - having Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. The last time I had Doughnuts from Dunkin' Donuts was a few years ago when I was in Dubai. My sister and I used to eat "Boston Creme" the most, and I managed to pick the same one for breakfast, as my colleague bought in a variety with a lot of (very bad) coffee.
The second highlight of the day was going out for dinner at this place called Cosi. By this point, my stomach was totally refusing any and all food that didn't have any nutritional value - I wasn't eating well, and if I was, it wasn't good food. That night I wanted something with just vegetables, and that's exactly what I had, in the form of a sandwich. Following this, my colleague thought of introducing us to proper American smores. It was very sweet, but such a fun experience.
The waitress bought us a whole platter of chocolate, marshmallows, gram crackers (digestives to us Brits) and a small pot with fire where we roasted our marshmallows. The whole idea was to get the marshmallow to a wonderfully soggy and brown texture without letting it burn, and putting it on top of the cracker with the chocolate pieces so it would melt in to one another. It was really yummy, but I think one would do it for anyone with a sweet tooth!
.. More to follow!
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