Thanksgiving Day

I'd write more, but it's almost 2 am.

Today is Thanksgiving. We just returned to our hotel room. I took long, steamy shower to wash the city from my pores. My nose keeps bleeding.

Here goes:

This morning we walked about 5 blocks to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. We were 2 blocks from Times Square from Scooby Doo...

Petit Poulet

Fish

until Spongebob Squarepants...

and then we (B, Brody, Lauren and I) made our way to what we called "the Google building"

where we were invited by Lauren's friend to watch the parade. Security checked us out and we elevated 19 blocks up to look down on the marching bands, parade floats, dancing (freezing) cheer-leaders etc.

Lauren's friend was a great host and made us cappucinos in the Google kitchen. The Google offices in NYC replaced Bad Boy Entertainment (P. Diddy used to chill out there.) I ate a banana.

Dora the Explorers Backside

We were out on a balcony and we leaned over the edge of the railing to see below. It was cool. I took about a million pictures. I called my mom and she could hear the bands echoing off the buildings in the background.

Once Santa Clause wrapped up the parade, we met up with my aunt Marilyn and the 5 of us packed into a car and drove to Weston, Connecticut. We had Thanksgiving dinner with Lauren's extended family at her uncle's house. Lauren's uncle has extensive art, book, seashell, old toy, squash court collections. Lauren's dad is an architect and designed the house.

The eclectic uncle has a knack for meeting people and apparently invited the ping-pong world champion of 1987 to Turkey Day with the family last year. Today he had invited the most award-winning swing dancer...

Back to the extensive art collection. Brody and I noticed and subsequently freaked out upon realizing that we had come across the original, hand-written lyrics of "Hey Jude." There were also original, hand-written letters from Presidents of the united States and various inventors- Thomas Edison...

After dinner the family literally sat around a grand piano and sang songs. One of Lauren's uncles played the piano and her aunt sang show tunes, like a vocally trained show-stopper. Then their kids played piano, played the violin, sang, their little girl danced and it was almost surreal... but very real.

THEN we were ushered into a room where the swing dancer lined us up and taught us how to swing (dance). As B and I took swing lessons once last summer, we were prepared. We learned the 3 basic steps and it was awesome, crazy, unexpected and fun! What a Thanksgiving- with a different family, on a different coast!

We left Connecticut and drove to SoHo to drop my aunt off, but she was game to let us tour her place first. She owns one level of a 4 or 5 level residential building and has since the 1970's or 80's when SoHo was frightening and dangerous. The place was enormous and artsy and she invited us to stay whenever we wanted. Marilyn also showed us her latest pottery creations. In her living space, she has one of three pottery kilns in Manhattan (Brody/Lauren, please correct the details.)

B, Brody, Lauren and I then drove to where they live in Brooklyn. Lauren made us hot chocolate and we made a real fire in a fireplace!

Then Brody drove B and I back to our hotel and now I'm so tried I'm hungry and it's time to stop writing.

Kisses to everyone.