Hopefully everyone had a decent time doing whatever it is you people do.
I've never been a huge fan of New Year's Eve...but I still try to go out and have some fun. I even spent one year having just gotten my wisdom teeth out, and so had my sister, and we sat on the couch, watched the ball drop, then went to bed.
New Years is kind of a weird holiday. Here's what you're supposed to do: dress up, go out, drink, kiss somebody, drink, and stay out as late as possible. But wait...that just sounds like a regular old college party. That's because it's pretty much the same. The only difference is that everyone waits for midnight, and there's a lot more pressure on the night to be awesome.
Well....for this New Year's Eve I had a great time with my friends in Philly. I went with my gang from JMU. It was the guys who I lived with, plus the girls who lived down the street. We were missing Jared and Colin, and Chris showed up New Year's Day. But the night before, we had a lot of fun. We went out to this Italian restaurant named Il Cantuccio that was on North 3rd Street in Philly. It was BYOB so we brought cheap champagne, a few wine bottles, and a couple bottles of Guinness. We were ready to eat our hearts out. It was a 4 course meal: Antipasto, Il Primo, Il Secondo, and Dolce. I only took 2 years of Italian but I'm pretty sure I remembered that right.
Before the meal: Bread was on the table that was nice and soft in the middle, sesame seeds on the outside, and some bonus stuff on the table. There was olive oil for us to use, along with a bowl of pesto and tomato-based spreads for our bread. It was delicious. Hollins even made a cool combination of all 3 things that looked great and she swore by it. Too bad Emily is essentially allergic to photosynthesis and couldn't have that pesto...or anything else green. Poor Em. And our waiter was this guy who was a perfect mash-up of Philly and Italy with his accent, attitude, Italian pronunciation, and his love of people and food. He was a fantastic waiter, the only one for the tiny little restaurant all night actually. Yet, the service was phenomenal and he always provided a good laugh about one of us non-Philly folks.
Antipasto: We got to choose between Caprese salad, the house salad, and mussels. We all got the Caprese or the mussels. Both were delicious. I stole a few mussels from Doug and I can't remember the last time I had food that good! The mussels were in a kind of tomato-based sauce that was perfect for them as they soaked it up in the bottom of their shells. The Caprese had the juiciest tomatoes, great cuts of mozzarella, cracked black pepper, and the fresh arugula with it was delicious and made a fantastic antipasto for me to start the night with.
Primi: Our choices were Gnocchi (made of ricotta cheese I believe), Orecchiette with salmon, or some other pasta that none of us ordered either. I got the Orecchiette (which kind of looks like shell pasta but it's not) and it was served with a thick creamy sauce and roasted salmon which almost tasted like bacon somehow. But I didn't ask questions, because all I had time for was stuffing my face with this meal! Best pasta dish I have ever had in my entire life! That's how good it was. I scraped the bottom of my dish for the sauce after I was done just to try to get more of that meal.
Secondi: Our choices were veal marsala, tilapia with some seafood sides, and chicken with some veggies. NOTE: these plates all were SUPER Italian but I forget some of the details so "some veggies" doesn't exactly do it justice. Forgive me. Moving on...because we had our reservation at 9pm (the last shift going through) they ended up running out of veal and substituted chicken for it. I ordered the tilapia that was baked in a delicious sauce with basic seasonings on top, a lemon on the side, and a few shrimp and clams on the edge of the plate. I could try to stab my fish with my fork and it just flaked and fell apart. It was perfectly cooked and seasoned. It was so light but juicy and flavorful and when adding a few squeezes of lemon it got even better. While we had shared our food with each other all meal long, I only had one bite of Christian's chicken and veggies, I didn't really want anyone else's food. My fish was perfect. I wanted it all.
Dolce: Well...because we were last group, as I said before, they had somehow run out of dessert. So our table of 11 only got 2 cream puffs and 2 slices of tiramisu. The tiramisu was heavenly. So light and fluffy. So delicious and rich. It was just kind of unfortunate that they ran out of dessert for us all...especially Emily, because it was her birthday on Sunday. One of the girls told the waiter this, so he grabbed a plate off the table as if he was cleaning it up, yet it had 1 cream puff left. He speared a birthday candle into it, lit it, and turned around to get the whole restaurant to sing "Happy Birthday" to Emily. It was perfect.
It was a great start to the night. All of us dressed up, having a great time, chatting it up with the waiter who kept uncorking our bottles and making fun of us, and catching up with everyone who we hadn't seen in months. Sipping a nice glass of red wine while eating some delicious Italian food and getting ready for the ball to drop with my best friends was great. We left the restaurant at 11:15pm and discovered that several important streets were closed/blocked off. So we got stuck in traffic. We found the ball drop on the radio with about 7 seconds left, counted down, and cheered out to everyone around us in the traffic with our windows down and music blasting. Then, fireworks began to explode overhead and we all stuck our heads out the windows for a good look. People stepped out of their cars, or stopped on the sidewalk, as the fireworks exploded and lit up the sky. So, it wasn't exactly the way we had imagined spending the ball drop, but it makes for a good story of my New Year's Eve.
The next day, we woke up kind of early, had breakfast, and got dressed and ready to go see the Mummer's Parade. If you don't know what it is just check out my pictures below, Wikipedia it, and know that it's a bunch of men (and a few women and children) in costumes doing awesome things. It's so cool. I loved going to see the parade...and I don't like parades much at all. That's saying a lot.
Anyways...I hope you had a great New Year's...and don't forget:
-New Year's resolutions are ridiculous. Why pick only one day a year to take an active role on improving yourself for the better? Instead, do it every day of the year. Yet...I guess a New Year's resolution can't hurt, can it?
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