Our Halloween festivities began last weekend. There was a pumpkin festival in Central park which included a pumpkin carving day and a pumpkin sail. We walked through the park on the pumpkin carving day, and even though it was raining, there were lots of people and lots of pumpkins! People had carved out jack-o-lanterns and then placed them along the paths in the park. They were everywhere! It was neat to walk around and look at peoples creations. Most of them were pretty typical, but there were a few good and unique ones.
The pumpkin sail took place in the evening. People brought their jack-o-lanterns, lit candles in them, placed them on Styrofoam floats and floated them down the Harlem Meer. It was really neat to see all these floating pumpkins, glowing at night and bobbing on the water. On Wednesday, there was a Halloween party at work, and everyone brought their kids in all dressed up. That was very cute, and my only opportunity to see children dressed up this year. On Friday we went to the Village Halloween parade. It was packed! There were more than 2 million people at the parade, and I'd say at least half of them were dressed up in costumes. There were some really neat and funny costumes too. I think my favorite was a group of girls that were dressed up as different coloured crayons. There was also a guy dressed up as a Ken doll, still in the box. He had created a full sized box with clear plastic in front, and he was wearing a bathing suit. It was pretty funny. We also saw a group of people dressed as Bananas, but they weren't wearing pyjamas. :)
In other fall news, the trees have finally started to be quite colourful. Last weekend, we bought a bag full of apples from the farmer's market and made an apple pie which was really delicious and heaping with apples.
In other NYC weekend news, we discovered there are free recitals every weekend at Julliard. We went to
a harpsichord concert yesterday evening. It was the first time I've ever seen a harpsichord played live. Chris thought it sounded pretty primitive, and I guess it did, but that was part of what made it so unique. I suppose I would have been satisfied with a shorter performance. However, I'm glad we stayed until the end, because when we got outside we heard several large "boom" noises. At first we thought it was construction noise, but it was really too loud for that, and Ben thought we were being attacked by bombs, but then we thought it was probably fireworks. So we decided to head to Central Park, which was near by and the only possible place where they could be setting off fireworks. When we got to Central Park West, sure enough it was fireworks, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently there were several calls to the local police departments with people worried that we were being attacked. The fireworks were really nice, and there were even some heart shaped ones! We had a decent view from where we were, especially considering we didn't even know about it. I can't believe there were fireworks and I didn't know about them! If we hadn't been there at the right time, we would never have known about them!
I later found out the fireworks were for the NYC marathon, which was today. When we went out this morning (I'll explain why later) the race was going right by the entrance to the subway near our apartment. It was really neat to watch. There were a lot of people running - more than 100,000 according to their website. I can't believe that many people can run a marathon. There were people standing all along the sides cheering them on, and clapping. We joined in for a bit, because we need to get to the other side to the subway entrance. It was fun. When there was a bit of a break in the people (there was a lot of running traffic) we managed to run across by running on an angle with the flow. When we came back about an hour or two later there were still people running! Fortunately, we didn't have to cross again because the exit from the subway is on the other side.
So the reason we went out was to go skating! We went to the
Pond at Bryant Park which opened up last weekend. We had tried to go twice last weekend, but the first time it was closed due to rain, and the second day it closed just as we got there because it was too hot and the ice started melting. This was really frustrating because for the last three years we were waiting to go skating at the non-existing skating rink in the park near our house in Waterloo that they promised us when we bought our house. So we waited three years, we figured we could wait another weekend. So today we went as early as possible so the ice wouldn't melt during the heat of the day. We made it to the rink and it was open! We put our skates on and went around several times and I really enjoyed skating there. It's a really nice spot to skate.