Those shoes!

I spent a large chunk of my childhood at a boarding school in northern India, and two of my best friends were Bhutanese. The King of Bhutan got married last week, and since then my facebook feed has been filled with pictures of the ceremony and of the pair. I've always thought that the kera, the women's national dress, was beautiful, but Queen Jetsun Pema's wedding kera is so gorgeous (and is she not just so beautiful?). I love that her shoes are as crazily patterned and detailed as her dress.

PS - I don't know who took this photo - I found it here.

Week 34 and the Great Blizzard of 2010

Everybody already knows that Mother Nature dumped a huge amount of snow on NYC at the beginning of the week. I had been hoping for a white Christmas, and the storm definitely scratched that itch. We had plans to have dinner with a friend, so we wandered out into the blizzard and walked to the west village to a very empty (and tasty!) Mexican restaurant. All of these photos were taken on our way back home. Keep in mind that NYC got 20" of snow by the time all was said and done, and our photos were taken at about 8" of accumulation.

Other than the wind (which was brutal!) it was a lot of fun to walk through the storm - everything was so pretty, and what human beings you did run into were enjoying themselves, too. There was definitely an air of comradery that night - my brother and his wife were visiting from North Carolina and commented on how the snow made everyone so much more friendly. They were supposed to fly out on Monday but got stuck here until Thursday - it was nice to have a few extra days with them!

Spicy Hot Chocolate

We put up our Christmas tree this Sunday. Sean is always worried that if we get the tree too early, it will be dead by Christmas, so we did some research on how to keep your tree alive. There are lots of strange suggestions online, ranging from hot water, to bleach, to aspirin. We're testing out the hot water theory.

I made some hot chocolate to keep us company while we decorated the tree, attempting to make spicy hot chocolate for the first time. Considering I didn't have cayenne pepper, I think it turned out pretty yum! We used up an old hot chocolate mix we had lying around, but I can't find it on their website anymore, so now I need to find an affordable/delicious hot chocolate mix to replace it. Any suggestions?

Cee Lo

Sean and I went to a dinner celebrating the launch of Absolut's limited edition Glimmer vodka last night. We photographed the launch for Notcot, so check over there for the full post some time over the next few days. It was a little weird being the pregnant lady at a vodka opening, but dinner was delicious and Sean told me the cocktails were also delicious. The best part of the evening, though, was a (short) performance by Cee Lo, who is a tiny, stout and cute man! It was just him (no band), which was a bit of a bummer, but he covered all of the best songs, so Sean and I went home happy...

Big Bambu Tour

Sean and I got up much earlier than we normally like to on the weekend, in order to make it up to the Met by 9:00am so we could get tickets to tour the Big Bambu installation. After a full week of rain, we lucked out today with a gorgeous day - sunny, breezy, and cool.



The tour of Big Bambu did not disappoint (our tour guide, Maeve, was great!). There are awesome views from the top (you end up 5 stories above the Met's rooftop), and I loved walking along the maze of paths. The different paths are almost invisible in the mass of bamboo until you're upon them. Big Bambu is like a treehouse on steroids.



Apparently Doug and Mike Starn enlisted a bunch of rock climbers to build the installation because they wanted four things: people who could climb safely, weren't afraid of heights, were expert knot-tiers (that is all that holds the installation together), and people who didn't have preconceived notions of what it means to build things (so, no construction workers, architects, etc). The installation started going up in May, and will come down in October. It's been built organically over the past five months, with no plans set in stone other than the general form.



You can tell that the rock climbers have had a lot of leeway in the construction of Big Bambu - there are all kinds of random little insertions/details: benches, a built-in recliner in the middle of nowhere, and a living room area, complete with beer cozies and wind chimes. Unfortunately, they don't allow photography on the tours (boo), so we had to settle for photos from the rooftop of the Met.

If you haven't been there yet, I highly recommend going before it closes on October 31st. I also suggest getting in line for tickets a little before 9:00am - we were one of the first ones there, and the line got super long behind us...




Found this funny statue in one of the sculpture galleries on our way out of the Met...I guess he doesn't like me very much...

2010 Dance Parade

Yesterday the police set up barricades all over the east village. Sean and I were wondering what they were for, and today I found out - the 4th annual Dance Parade...(although I have no memory of the route going past our apartment in previous years!)

Dancers of all kinds square danced, belly-danced, jived, and hoola hooped down our street. It was pretty fun to watch, especially the more traditional ethnic dances.





Don't you love his Nike shoes? I think this dancer was Tibetan?













The swim aerobics people were by far the funniest. All kinds of randomness going on here.





My favorite part of the whole Dance Parade, might have been seeing all of my various neighbors come out of their caves to hang out on their fire escapes. I'm always curious as to who lives nearby...