Brett Chang’s Blog

Just took a road trip down to Philadelphia with the lady this past weekend. It is only about 2-2.5hours away from New York City and the weather was awesome for the drive.

The first stop we made at Philly was the Italian Market. There was a big crowd there on Saturday morning and it seemed like most of them were there to do their weekly grocery shopping. The price is A LOT cheaper than New York City. You can get a bucket of small green peppers (guestimated at about 3 pounds) for a dollar. However, the quality is somewhat of a Russian roulette — ranging from fresh to slightly bruised to down right rotten. As a rule of thumb, shop around for better quality and price.

While entering the market we saw a stand selling asparaguses at 4 bundles for a buck. It was inconceivable. Kelly quickly shifted into S (Shopping) gear, but I immediately pulled her back and reminded her that there were other stands to see and we could always come back. She agreed.

As we treaded deeper into the market, we were just being price shocked, in a good way. 7 oranges for a dollar? Got them. 3 bundles of scallion for a buck? Bought. Boxes and boxes of asparaguses for FREE?

Wait, FOR FREEEEEEE?

For free it was! Granted that the asparaguses looked lifeless, bruised and just plainly abused, still, it was free. There was an Asian lady there next to the boxes, looking like a local, and she was rather amused, too.

“Free! No money!” she exclaimed to the people surrounding her while fingering the asparaguses to see if they could be salvaged.

Standing there, watching the Asian lady probing the asparaguses with her index finger and thumb, shoppers roaming by and people vendoring their goods — I was rather perplexed by the whole situation.

Free asparaguses just don’t happen.

And then it dawned on me — Philadelphia is about anything and everything free. Freedom, freedom fries, Free Library and free asparaguses. Soon after, another thing hit me — the stand that was selling asparaguses at 4 bundles for a buck — they probably got their asparaguses here and for free!

Damn those scamming Phillies.

Other than asparaguses, another attraction in Italian market is the Philly cheese steak, Geno’s and Pat’s. I tried both and they were all pretty good, but I guess Pat’s is the original cheese steak stand, and the fact that the line was longer and we all know that the longer the line, the better the food — Pat’s gets the vote.

Later, I took Kelly to Morimoto’s, of Iron Chef fame, for dinner. Her verdict was that it is better than Nobu/Nobu Next-Door in all categories: price, taste and most important of all, amount of food. I’ve never tried Nobu, so I will take her words.

Following the dinner and hotel check-in, we were out and about to see what Philadelphia has to offer at Saturday night (which really wasn’t much), and had the following exchange at one red light with a passenger in the taxi next to my car:

He rolled down his window and yelled to me, “Hey, do you know where the ***** building is?”

With a smirk in my face, I yelled back, “I am from New York. I don’t know, man.”

“Meee tooooo! Philly sucks.” The fellow New Yorker replied with utter disappointment.

He then rolled up his window as the light turned green and the taxi sped away.

Other than that the rest of the weekend was spent touring around parts of the town, getting drunk on cheap wine. We even found time to swing by Atlantic City to donate our money to the casinos. All in all, we had fun and made it home safe and sound.

Go see more photos.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.