Jersey Diary: Goodbye Ohio. Hello NJ!

It's time for the Jersey posts to begin. On Friday, while I was at work, Phil and his parents were making their way across hilly PA to help haul away the rest of our things. The moving company already took the majority of our stuff before the Seattle trip. All we had left was a couple boxes of clothes, a TV and an air mattress.

After I got off work all 4 of us went to "chinatown" to have dinner with Phil's mom's childhood friend one last time. Going out to dinner with them always promises mounds of food. The husband and wife know the owners of most of the chinese restaurants in the area, but they normally take us to one called Li Wah. Everytime we go the cook always comes out to tell us what's good, and the table is usually so full they have to stack plates on top of each other. We were so busy eating we forgot to take pictures of all the food. So you'll have to settle for pictures of people.

In the back are Phil's parents, and in the front are his mom's friend, her husband and her mom.

And here is a picture of our friend May and her baby girl Su-Kyi!

May, her husband Anthony and Su-Kyi joined us at Li Wah for dinner. Phil's parents went crazy over Su-Kyi. I'm still convinced that Phil's mom would have taken Su-Kyi home, but then again I probably would too. She's such a cutie ^__^

After we slept off the Chinese food we started packing up the 2 cars and started the long trip to NJ. 7 long hours driving in the car listening to the mp3 player. I was in and out of sleep for most of the trip. Less because I was tired and more because there was nothing to do, and the rocking of the car tends to make you sleepy anyway. I would wake up to make sure Phil wasn't getting tired, but he was always wide awake...
This was what our view was for most of the trip. That's the butt of Phil's dad's car.
After we arrived in NJ we stopped by my family's house to drop off some of our stuff. And since it was almost dinner time we decided to all go out to eat before Phil, his parents and I headed to Phil's house in Queens. My mom and sister took us to a Malaysian restaurant called Penang.

Here is Phil and his parents outside the restaurant. And that's my sister making funny faces on the other side of the glass door behind Phil...Can you tell Phil is getting hungry?

Penang is a pretty popular restaurant. The inside was fairly big, but there were still tons of people waiting to get a table. While we waited I was going to walk across the parking lot with Phil and his parents to check out the Asian food market, Kam Man Food. But just as we started walking over there was a huge cloud of smoke that seemed to come out of nowhere. And we're not talking about a light puff of smoke, we're talking thick "where the heck am I" kind of smoke. People were turning back from the food store saying something about a fire, and a minute later the fire trucks arrived. Phil's dad seemed to think it was a man hole fire. How exactly that happened I'm not so sure.

Here are the fire trucks pulling into the parking lot across from the restaurant. Probably wondering what this silly Asian girl is doing taking pictures... After all that excitement we finally got seated in the restaurant.
The food was very tasty. And the best part is there was a birthday celebration at one of the tables. Now, instead of doing the standard bring out a dessert and sing, they actually turned out the lights in the entire restaurant, brought out the dessert and sang Happy Birthday along with a recording that they played over the speakers. It was so amusing I have decided this is going to be the location of Phil's next birthday, for some good old fashioned birthday embarrasement. And since he's not big on surprises you are all my witnesses that he has been given fair warning.

Anyway, this time I remembered to take pictures of all the dishes. I don't remember the names of all the food, so I'll just let you look at all the yummy pictures.