Our adventures in New York continue! This week has been one of our funnest in New York City. The temple has been closed for cleaning and reopened this week. It was our first opportunity to go to the Manhattan Temple. Despite how cold and busy this city is, it was beautiful to step into the House of the Lord from right off the street and feel the warmth, the quiet and the peace of the spirit that fills that holy house. Neither of us are fluent in spanish, but after leaving the temple, we had become experts since the temple website failed to mention that the day and time we had chosen to go was a spanish session. It was still a good experience and we had a good laugh about it. It is a very small temple and we are surprised by how few people are inside compared to how large the city is.
Mat has school from Monday - Thursday, with a half day on thursday. Serena works from home and is there all day. So when Friday comes, we are ready to have a break and get out of the house. So Thursday night is the beginning of our weekend here. It gives us one day to play, one day to get things done, do homework assignments and grocery shop, and one day to keep the sabbath day holy. Friday is typically our fun day where we like to get out of the house and discover the sites of the city and have our date night. We take turns planning our date nights (which are turning into date days) and it was Serena's goal this week to do the most fun for the least amount of money. We took the subway to the brooklyn bridge and walked across the whole bridge. It gave a beautiful view of the river, Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Statue of Liberty. We asked a Japanese couple to take our picture and then offered to take a picture of them. The wife smiled and said, "Thank you so much" then put her arm around Serena and said she was ready for the picture. She wanted a picture of Serena and her. We were confused but thought it was super hilarious. It was probably the first time she saw a white girl with blonde hair in the entire city...because for some reason all the white girls here have brown hair.
We continued our walk to the City Hall courtyard where there were many beautiful old buildings and we learned more about the history of New York. We walked to Saint John's University where Mat goes to school which is right across the street from Goldman Sachs headquarters and took some pictures. We finished our walk by going to China....town :) It is obvious when you arrive in Chinatown...there are no other races there except for A LOT of Chinese people with a few out of place white people with cameras and goofy smiles and one Tahitian guy. We wondered around the shops and saw many Seafood markets, fruit markets and lots of people selling clothes, ginseng, jewelry, cell phone plans and more all from the same small building.
We had a delicious dinner at a place called Sweet Spring Restaurant. We saw many good reviews of it online, even though from the looks of it you wouldn't think it's anything special and would probably have picked the nicer looking building across the street to dine at. But we knew there was only one thing we wanted and that was our Pork Dumplings!!!! (some of you may call them pot stickers). You get 5 for $1.25. Pretty much everything on the menu is less then $4.00 and we were so happy to find so much food for so cheap. But cheap wasn't the best part...the food is amazing and we got some dumplings to go so we could eat them the next day. We were in heaven.
It's hard to find a public bathroom in Chinatown...even in downtown Manhattan. We saw a lady police officer and asked where we might find one...and she told us to go to the police station, or the precinct as they call it. We spent part of our date night in the police station watching a man with handcuffs on his wrists and feet be escorted into the building. Our new best friend police officer told us it was one of the oldest precinct stations in New York city and showed us different parts of the building. Cops are so nice when you have to go potty :) (Quand tu dois aller au petit coin) he he he.
We will keep a list of all of our favorite places in case any of you decide to come visit us and we will take you there! :) hint hint hint
Saturday we worked hard on assignments, but we took some time to enjoy a walk in our beautiful park.
Sunday, today, we enjoyed getting to know the members of our ward. Serena got a calling to be a primary teacher for the CTR class (5 to 7 year olds). We think Mat is going to get called as a French sunday school teacher as we have many members in the ward from Haiti who speak French and Creole and are new to the church. Today was a cold day so we stayed inside after church and made some delicious heart shaped brownies to stay warm with...in preparation for the Lovers Holiday coming up this week. We hope you all have a happy valentines week and know that you are loved, remembered, and we pray for you all often. Thank you Mom and Dad Danielson for the shipment of our kitchen utensils this week and some valentines surprises inside as well. We love having our pots, pans and knives again. Thank you Mom Van Bastolear for letting us wake you up at 5am on a saturday morning to talk to us for many hours. We are fully aware of our time differences with all of you but we will still keep in touch anyway! :)
Love you all,
Serena and Mat Peltzer
p.s. we decided to name our first set of Twins Brooklyn and Bronx....if the day comes that we happen to have a set of twins that also happens to be one boy and one girl :) just kidding...maybe!
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