Working for the Weekend...

Last weekend was spent helping others! It’s nice to do that occasionally, and I really should be able to do it more often! On Saturday, I spent the day at my friend Christina’s apartment. She moved recently into an apartment where every inch of the walls was covered in wallpaper. From the description, I thought the wallpaper was going to be awful, but it wasn't that bad, just a bit overwhelming. She is stripping the wallpaper and painting. We spent Saturday trying to get leftover wallpaper glue off the walls – not an easy task! By the time I left, we’d switched our method numerous times and had decided that scrubbing the walls with a very wet sponge seemed to be easiest and work well. I like doing big projects like that and it’s definitely more fun when you have someone to chat with while working.

On Sunday, I got to go to the coolest place! It is called the Bowery Mission’s Women’s Center. It is a home occupying an entire Brownstone on the Upper East Side and is for women who have been homeless and had chemical dependencies. The home was so awesome – it felt just like a house and was big and decorated nice. I cooked dinner in their awesome chef’s kitchen with 6 other girls from church. It was so fun! We made chicken enchiladas, black bean soup, and homemade salsa with chips (can you tell we’re almost all from Texas?) I was mainly in charge of the soup – it was a huge task as we were quadrupling the recipe. Tons of chopping was involved and we were working with pretty dull knives. By the time I finished cutting my 4th onion, I had to call for reinforcement. Some of the other girls each took a different veggie and before I knew it, they had chopped celery, zucchini, and green peppers while I chopped 16 cloves of garlic…by hand. Yeah, my hands smelled like garlic for at least 48 hours and I was even wearing gloves!! Then, I stood over the stove for 30 minutes watching the soup cook while I also cooked rice to serve with the soup. I woke up several times that night because I could still smell the soup…I think it was in every pore in my body and in my hair! I could smell it all the next day, too – after showering! Crazy. It was a great time, though. We got to eat dinner with the 21 ladies who live in the house – they were so cute and nice! I’ve been learning a lot about how I judge people by their looks and am finding out that I am often so, so wrong. These ladies looked very nice, were dressed well, spoke professionally, and were so sweet. If I had met them somewhere else, I never would have guessed that they were living in a home like this. It was a really neat experience!

I got to try 2 fun new restaurants this week. Tonya was in town for work again, so I met up with her on Monday night for dinner. We went down to the East Village – I really need to explore this area more often. It is so interesting, great people watching, and lots of restaurants to investigate! Our destination was Caracas, a Venezuelan Arepas bar. Tonya had seen it a while back on Bobby Flay’s Throwdown. It was great! A cute, tiny restaurant with very good food and great service. The wait was longer than they anticipated, so they gave us a free appetizer – their famous plantain/taro chips with their awesome guac. We split 3 different arepas that were all really good. I’d love to go back here sometime!

On Wednesday, I had book club and we met at Sala, a Spanish Tapas restaurant near Union Square. It was also a very fun restaurant with good food. We split about 5 different tapas, all of which were great, but my favorite was the Ham & Brie on toast. For our book, we read “Thousand Splendid Suns.” It was so good. Towards the end, I just couldn’t put the book down and ended up staying up really late 2 nights in a row to finish it. It is a really sad, awful story though, so don’t read it if that will bother you (Nicole...)!