IKEA

Last Saturday, our housing staff put on a "plant your own plant" event to help make our rooms "greener."  I planted spearmint and Pat planted a zinnia, both from seeds.  So yesterday, as our plants turned 1 week old, we were amazed to see that Pat's zinnia had sprouted overnight...

It was partly because of this that we decided to go to IKEA in Brooklyn - our plants need fancier pots.  It took nearly an hour to get to IKEA by train and ended up in a slightly questionable-looking neighborhood.  It was nice, though, because IKEA provides a free shuttle from the station to their store.  I've never been to an IKEA, but the Brooklyn store is huge and right on the waterfront.  The first floor is like their warehouse and the second floor houses all of the showrooms and a cafeteria.   Their food is super cheap ($2-4 per meal) and we ended up eating there for dinner.  The food was tasty.  Pat had the Swedish meatballs...

I had their pasta with meatballs...

The view from the cafeteria wasn't bad either.  In fact, it was gorgeous...

It took us a long time to get through the whole store, and it was really fun to look at the different studio apartment setups.  When we were ready to leave (by this time it was dark out), we weren't sure if we wanted to go back through the semi-sketchy neighborhood, so we opted for the other free IKEA shuttle: a watertaxi.  The ferry takes shoppers through the New York Bay, from the front of the store to Wall Street in Manhattan.  The watertaxi was fun and we got to see downtown Manhattan all lit up and the Statue of Liberty for the first time.  I wish we would've known about the watertaxi earlier because we could've taken it to IKEA too.  I highly recommend visiting IKEA and taking the watertaxi!  Here's the front of the store from the taxi...

I, of course, ended up buying more than some pots for our plants.  It's extremely difficult to resist all of the trendy wares and I bought this cool blown glass lamp...only $12!...

On a completely different note, last week was our last week of dodgeball.  I actually managed to catch a winning ball during one of the games.  Unfortunately, I also took a hard hit to the calf...

I believe our team ended up ranked last and we, obviously, didn't make it to the playoffs.  On Wednesday night, however, there's an award night and the word on the street is that we will probably win the "spirit award."  Oh boy!