Weekend of February 17-18: Anouck's family

We kicked off the weekend on Saturday evening in a fabulous Thai restaurant in the East Village, called The Elephant. Although at first sight, the restaurant looked like a bar that had known better times, the food was great (even Anouck's father, who is an authority in the Thai food area, agreed).


The Sunday started with a fabulous breakfast at the hotel where everybody stayed (Wannes apparently was determined to win the first prize in the "Who can eat the most" contest, never knew somebody could eat so much in one meal :-). After that we went off to do the (by now) traditional tour of Fifth Avenue, visiting MoMA & then on to Times Square (in my 5 months in NY, I hadn't been into the M&M store, it's amazing how one product can spin-off so many merchandising) & onto Macy's.

Given that our lunch consisted of a traditional hamburger meal 'à l'Américaine' (meaning there is no way you can have more fat & other unhealthy substances packed into your meal) we definitely wanted a decent restaurant for the evening. Using the Zagat guide we found an amazing Tribeca Argentinian restaurant, called Industria Argentina. I've seldom eaten a better steak than that one. After that we had some drinks at the hotel bar, where Astrid managed to fool the waitress into believing she is 21 already (US bars are extremely sensitive to underage drinking, which is probably one of the root causes why most of my colleagues, being in their mid-twenties, are still very fond of drinking games...)

Monday was spent walking through Soho, Greenwich Village, Union Square, Central Park & Bloomingdale's. Given the extremely cold temperatures, I was almost happy to go into another apparel shop every 5 minutes... The culinary depth point of the day was our evening meal, at a restaurant called 'Doyer's Vietnamese Restaurant'; the fish Anouck's father ordered looked like it had been served to a couple of guests before who had politely refused to eat it and the complimentary water had so much chlore in it that it almost seemed like as if they were trying to sanitize the place by sanitizing it's customers...

The last morning was spent on a tour through the financial district & Tribeca. All in all a terrific weekend. I'm just sorry that I will have to wait about 1.5 months before I see Anouck again(which is when I will be heading home...)