Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Girlfriend Experience

This post has nothing to do with Steven Soderbergh's film. But this weekend I experienced being a girlfriend, and what it's like when you're the girlfriend meeting LITERALLY 50 family members (of your boyfriend).

Flew into JFK on Weds night, and spent a day lazin' around on Thursday before making the 9 1/2 hour drive from Brooklyn to Youngstown, Ohio to meet Ari's parents and siblings and extended family for the first time. They were all super nice, thankfully, although Ari had warned me that his mother could be scary (she served in the Israeli army, after all), it was all hearsay. They were all very welcoming and sweet, and the whole family gets along ridiculously well (I wasn't sure families like that actually existed).

Anyway, there was a reunion/birthday party on Saturday night for approximately 50 relatives/friends, and I think I met them all. Platters of food; a birthday cake in the shape of a 3D castle, and 10 boxes of pizza. It was a fun night.

We packed up to leave on Sunday morning, and got 30 miles into Pennsylvania, only to discover at the first rest stop that our brakes weren't working! So 2 hours later we were towed back to Youngstown, spent an EXTRA night in Youngstown, waited for the car to get fixed, which took until 7pm. So we got back to Brooklyn at 2am this morning. Hooray!

Highlights of the weekend:
  • Handel's Ice Cream (a Youngstown institution)--we bought 5 different flavors (chocolate pecan, mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, peach, black cherry)
  • Learning Rummikub (a family institution, apparently)
  • Finding a cool random Indian/Pakistani market on our scenic walk around the car repair shop
  • Walking around the lake (Newport Lake) that is literally less than a block from Ari's backyard. And the area is so lush and GREEN in summer! And humid. I felt like I was in Hawaii.

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