Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the year of the Tiger and Sunday was Valentine’s Day too. What a dilemma: do you pay attention to the New Year or to the made up Hallmark holiday? That was solved in seconds and we went to celebrate the New Year.

This has been a busy weekend. On Friday I met up with some old friends who I have not seen for a while. That was great fun and I spent more time catching up and only took a handful of photos. We ate at a place on Bowery Street called Kens Asian Taste.

Saturday we headed to Flushing for errands and to meet up with the in-laws. We drove to Flushing and I thought it was bad. Sunday I would see what a bad driving day is in Chinatown. In the late afternoon we headed over to my brother-in-law’s place and had a great dinner.  You know the family get together that everyone crowds around the dinner table? It was like that and we all had a good time. The only down side was that I forgot to bring my camera and Vonage box. Every year the in-laws call China and the Vonage box would have been useful: China is one on the unlimited calling to countries.

Sunday was the day we all headed to Chinatown. Instead of driving we took the LIRR to Penn station and then the IRT. Good thing we did; the place was a car disaster area.

Lot's of people in Chinatown

Afterward we walked around looking for a place to eat. We ended up going to Hester Street, down to Elizabeth Street and Canal Street, and back to Hester Street once again and went to XO Kitchen. The wait for the table was over an hour. That’s not too bad since over at Gum Fung people said they were not letting any new customer in. They stopped handing out numbers.

Next stop was the Empire State Building. We had heard that they had some sort of Chinese New Year display and wanted to see it.

It was a little disappointing. It was Valentine’s Day also, so after relaxing for a few minutes we all headed home.