Another Weekend in Elm City

Hi again everybody!

This weekend, I went down to New Haven to visit Kyra for the weekend. On Friday, she showed me around the medical campus a bit and we walked around some Yale buildings with one of her friends. They have this room called the "brain room" that is full of, as you may expect, human brains. Her friend told us that they have something in there signed by Pavlov, of dog fame, but we couldn't find where it was. After, we also visited a couple libraries, including the Beinecke library, Yale's big rare books and manuscripts library. It was really beautiful except there are no windows inside which I thought was weird, so it's kind of dark, but I like dark libraries personally.

For dinner, we went to Barcelona Wine Bar. It's a big tapas chain I think, and they have a location in Boston, but I've never been, so we checked out the one in New Haven. The food was good but a bit pricy and it was very loud! We got some hummus, patatas bravas, and of course the Albondigas. Our waitress took the albondigas off the bill because it took a kinda long time to come, even though we didn't ask her to do that, that's how I know it was a fancy place (or maybe their clientele are just the kind of people who would ask you to take something off their bill lol, we just added it back into our tip)

Saturday morning, Kyra had to wake up early to get CPR certified. It seems like they're really keeping them busy with all these certifications and activities they are doing, but of course Kyra passed easily. Afterward, we met up at a plant shop called Bark and Vine to get a couple house plants. We want to have an apartment with a lot of plants so this was our first step toward doing that. The employee at the plant store was really nice and repotted one of our plants for us while giving us advice. I don't exactly have a green thumb, so we shall see how this goes, but Kyra has been putting one of our plants (we already forgot the name) by a humidifier on the plant store's advice. Hoping to do a better job with this than I did with my first year ivy (as Naoni no doubt remembers)

My fave plant. Peep the shakers also

Our little postcard/happy things wall. I think it's coming along well!

It has been really fun to explore New Haven a bit with Kyra! Last time I was there, we had COVID, so it wasn't very fun to walk around outside, and even when we ordered takeout coffee, it didn't taste very good because my sinuses were all messed up. It left a bad taste in my mouth in more ways than one toward New Haven, but this time, we walked around a lot and took note of a lot of places that look interesting or cute or tasty and I feel more excited to explore a new city. One place I was really excited to try was Little Italy. New Haven is famous for pizza, and I still haven't tried a New Haven slice (tho famous New Haven-ite Lauryn has given me some recommendations), but the Italian food I care about most of all is pastries. We technically live in Little Italy, but we walked to the main part of the square to try a pastry shop called Libby's. Kyra got a chocolate cannolo and I got a capuccino one. Kyra's was better in our opinion but they were both pretty good, and they had lots of other stuff, like gelato and Italian cookies as well that I am excited to try.

entrance to Little Italy. It's light-up but you can't really see it well during the day I think

We walked by this Italian church and I felt like I was back in Italy for a second lol

St. Michael, imprisoned in glass

Sunday was an animal-themed day. We drove out to another town to meet this dog Kyra is going to dogsit in a couple weeks. She is a big husky, and I was a little nervous to meet her because I'm a bit scared of dogs (at least big ones), but she was really nice! If I get to visit Kyra when she's dogsitting, I will take pics of her. She was really friendly and would come over to you to make you pet her if you didn't pay attention to her.

Then, in the afternoon, we went to Mew Haven, the only cat cafe in CT. Kyra has been considering adopting a cat, so we wanted to scope out the cats here. We were hoping it would be past nap-time but a lot of the cats were pretty sleepy when we got there. Still, we liked this one kitten called Twizzler a lot. She came up to us at first, but then went to sleep, and she let Kyra pick her up and put her in her lap. The cat cafe was fun except we felt a lil pressured to order a drink, but it felt a little gross drinking a beverage in a room full of like 15 cats in my opinion...so next time I think we'll skip it since you have to pay an entrance fee anyway. But I'll keep you updated if we decide to get a cat!

Twizzler (L) and Kara (R). they were lookalikes

Twizzler at rest. We think we need to come back to see her when she is more awake to get a sense of her personality, but we're worried someone will snatch her up by then

Okay, well, that's pretty much the play by play of last week. My train home was Monday afternoon and this guy behind me was snoring so loudly the whole way back to Boston...I was tight. But all's well that ends well and now I am home, trying to figure out if I will ever be employed and maybe applying to some new jobs. Bye bye my friends!