Happy Belated Birthday to Me!

So I am finally 21! I had a great weekend with my parents. They came in on Saturday evening and I met up with them at the Palace Hotel. I went right up to the 39th Floor, otherwise known as the executive lounge. Yeah, that's right. There was all these little appetizers set out and cookies and top shelf liquor. The crazy thing was, you could make your own drinks. I told Courtney I was going to bring in empty water bottles and fill them up with top notch vodka and bring them back to our dorm. Classy, right?

We went out to dinner on Saturday to a Lebanese (Shout out to Hannah!) restaurant called Naya. It is actually right around the corner from where I live. The restaurant itself is no wider than a car. It turns out Lebanese (shout out to Hannah!) is really good and the meat at the restaurant was amazing.

Of course we had to cleanse our palate with a little pinkberry. I took the unhealthy route and got fruity pebbles on mine. Oh, well.

On Sunday we got up and went upstairs to breakfast. They had so much food out ranging from bacon, brioche french toast, pastries, eggs, potatoes, and fresh fruit. It was so good! I tried to keep it to a minimum though because in the afternoon we had our food walking tour of Greenwich Village. The tour was over 3 hours long --but that's not a bad thing when food is involved. We had pizza, rice balls (Amazing!), cookies, chocolate, and bread to name a few samples. I have pictures that I will be loading eventually. During our tour the Gay Pride Parade was going on down the street. The parade itself was actually all over Manhattan so you really couldn't miss it.

After all that food and walking I took a nap and of course woke up in a cranky mood. I decided to go to the Palace gym --which overlooked St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Sunday evening we didn't really eat dinner since we were still so stuffed from our food tour. We went and saw "Next to Normal" at night. It's a Broadway show about a mentally-ill women. Sounds fun, huh? It actually was really good and the music was great.
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hen Monday came! AKA MY BIRTHDAY! YAY! GO ME! I got some breakfast upstairs and then I headed out with my parents for a little afternoon shopping. We went all over but mostly down to SoHo. Even though it was a Monday that area was still really crowded. It got annoying after awhile, especially in TopShop. Which, by the way, I swear every other girl in that store is like a twig and seven feet tall. How many models do we need?!

I also went to Dylan's Candy Bar which is pretty much my heaven. Yup, I'm 21 and I still get excited going into candy stores. They have every candy you can think of. Three floors full of candy. Just imagine.

Sunday evening I went up to the executive lounge with my parents to get my first legal drink. I had champagne with raspberry in it. oooo fancy. Actually, the manager of food and drinks had been talking to us the past few evenings and kinda got to know me and my rents. When I came up to the lounge the first thing he said was, "Happy Birthday." WHAAA?! He remembers everything! Then he asked if I would be staying with my parents for the night and I was nervous to answer. Why, you ask? Because technically our hotel was just for 2 ppl, so we would get charged extra if they knew I was staying there. So, I slowly said "yessss?" and he just turned to his computer and said OK. OH NO I'M CAUGHT!! That's what I thought...More on that later...

So then I had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Apizz. My first drink was a raspberry cosmo. You couldn't even take the alcohol. Dangerousss. For dinner I got handkerchief pasta with a tomato creme sauce with crab meat. It was amazing because you could tell the pasta was freshly made. They also came out with chocolate cake with a candle in it at the end of the night. It was great to spend it with my parents and Court and Lindsay. After our dinner we headed to Please Don't Tell. It was a speakeasy back in the 20's. You have to make reservations to get in and you actually enter through a hot dog restaurant. You go into a phone booth and pick up the phone. Then on the other side a door opens up and the hostess is sitting right there. It was cool because about 10 ppl got turned away while we were in the bar. Note: Their drinks are extremely strong.

At dinner Courtney surprised me with these amazing gifts too. One to mention was a mini 12 cupcake sampler from Crumbs. Yeah, she knows me too well. I am so excited to try them all!

So when we got back to our room at the hotel I was greeted with a table of a mini chocolate cake that read Happy Birthday and a bottle of Champagne chilling in an ice bucket. I quickly realized why the manager asked if I was going to be staying with my parents for the night. We looked up how much the Palace charges for the bottle of champagne I got : $125. I guess it pays to get to know people in the hotel business.

Well I actually had a busy day at work today too. I had to spend a lot of time checking through the new Guinness site which is going to launch tonight.

We are going out tonight too. But, as I type this I am about to scream because my ear is killing me. Stupid ear infections. It is actually keeping me from eating anything. Atleast I got it today and not on my birthday.

I will post pics soon!


THANKS FOR ALL THE BDAY WISHES!! :-)