In the midst of the midterm season, spring break has dawned on us, and while I try to convince myself to start studying for an upcoming Human Anatomy exam I have, I—as noted in the title—have been busy enjoying my time in New York City.

My previous blog featured a somewhat extensive summary of the beginning of my spring break. But while VIA-1 was an absolute blast, there is still an entire week of content that I can write (and post) about.

Granted, I’ve been to Manhattan a few times in the past, so this blog is mostly going to be about food and less about touristy things to do in NYC. But regardless, here’s a short recap of my 2024 spring break.

VIA-1

My spring break started off with a weekend spent at Purdue University for a conference called VIA-1, which was hosted by UVSA-Midwest. I’ve already written a blog about this event, so I won’t go too in-depth with it here. But in case you haven’t already read it (which you absolutely should), here’s an even shorter recap of it.

Essentially, VIA-1 consisted of a lot of family bonding activities, as well as some individual programming workshops to help us grow as people and leaders. There were performances, The three days were filled with a lot of laughter and smiles, and I walked away with so many new friends and countless memories.

 

New York City

After VIA-1, my roommates drove me to O’Hare so I could catch my flight to New York, where I got to the hotel close to midnight and met up with my mom.

As I mentioned earlier, food is going to be the main thing this blog will focus on. And boy oh boy, I definitely have enough content for this section. But I still got to do some sightseeing in NYC, and we did drive over to New Jersey for a day, so there will still be other bits in here.

Food

We surprisingly ate a lot of Asian food over break, and here are some of my favorite meals (click on the pictures to visit their websites!):

Sightseeing

Though we’ve been to NYC quite a few times, we still did some sightseeing around the city. Here are some of my favorite pictures of the places we went to!

 

New Jersey

For the last day we were in NYC, we rented a car and drove over to New Jersey to spend the day there. We had brunch and dinner at Fort Lee, then spent a few hours in the American Dream before we went on a drive to go sightseeing again.

 

Chicago and the Drive Back to Iowa City

To end off the break, we flew to Chicago to start our drive back to Iowa City. We stopped by Gaijin to grab lunch before we started the 3-hour car ride. Gaijin specialises in Japanese food, especially okonomiyaki which is by far the best we’ve had in the entire country so far. After finishing 2 okonomiyakis, we realized we wouldn’t be hungry enough for dinner later, so we decided to eat dessert as well.

Originally, we had planned to stay in Chicago a bit longer to eat dinner as well, but because the food at Gaijin was so filling, we decided to head back earlier, which basically ended my spring break there!

 

Extra Photos from my Camera

I took over 400 photos with my camera during spring break, and it would be a bit of a waste to not show any of them, so along with some photos already in this post, here is an extra section for photos I took with my camera that I especially like.