After our carriage rides through Central Park, we headed to one of my favorite restaurants in the city, Panna Garden II. Bethy had introduced us to this magical place during my 30th birthday trip, and we just knew they boys would love it.
It is a tiny restaurant that can only accommodate 30ish people at a time, and it's myriad of Christmas lights dripping from the ceiling make it impossible to stand up straight. It is enchanting.
The food is just as outstanding as the decor. With parties of 8 or more people, they automatically just serve you a set menu, so we didn't have to order, which was nice because we didn't have to worry about trying to order enough dishes to feed everyone or decide on which dishes everyone wanted. We did make sure to each get a mango lassi to drink while we waited for our dinner, the boys thought they were the best things ever!
They just kept bringing out dish after dish of amazing and flavorful entrees and sides, and if we ever ran out of a certain dish, they would bring us a new one, it was a really awesome way to eat Indian food family style.
When we were here for my birthday, we discovered the restaurant goes above and beyond with their birthday celebrations so we decided to celebrate Jame's birthday since his was the closest. All the lights go dark and bright lasers appear and loud dance music comes on over the speakers as the birthday boy is given a plate full of mango ice cream with candles! The personal birthday party goes on for a quite a while and all the other guests were having a great time joining in and wishing him a happy birthday!
After dinner, we headed to the subway to ride over to the Empire State Building to go see the view of the city. The boys hated the subway, they couldn't handle the multitude of smells one experiences from the stations, the platforms and the train, they were throughly grossed out haha.We were on the platform, waiting for the train for around 30 minutes before we realized that wasn't normal, so Ricky ran up to the ticket office to ask if there was something wrong with the trains, and they said there was a power outage in the subways and they had no idea how long it would be out. So, we just thought there was a glitch with the subways and we would have to walk to the Empire State Building.
Then we start to get text messages from Mom, who had opted to send the evening at the hotel. She was getting dinner next to a window with a view of Times Square and she watched as several of the screens went black, one by one ...
Then when she went to catch the elevator back up to her room, she was told there was a big power outage in this part of the city and it had made the elevators stop working, and the fire department had to come force open the doors to get people out. So, this power outage turned out to be a much bigger deal than we originally thought, it is now known as the Manhattan Black Out of July 2019.
Areas affected by the outage included Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and Broadway. Most theaters on Broadway cancelled their shows for the evening; of the 30 shows running at the time, only the four playing on the east side of Broadway were able to perform. Performances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center were also cancelled. However, some performers from the cancelled shows entertained audiences on the sidewalks outside the theaters.
The performance that was canceled at Carnegie Hall was the last performance of the MCO concert we had seen Ricky perform in early that day. Karin and Ricky were heartbroken for all the performers they knew that had worked so hard, spent time and money to travel, and were so excited to sing in Carnegie Hall that night. But they made history and the news by lining up on the sidewalk and singing some of the songs from the program. Tons of people stopped in the street to hear them perform, people emerging from the broken subway stations said it was like hearing a choir of angles. So in the end, they were able to share their message and their music with far more people than the audience they would have had inside Carnegie Hall. One video posted online of their impromptu concert has been viewed over 5 million times.
Our walk to the Empire State Building was long, very long, we had several blocks to cover and no other way of transportation. The subways weren't working, taxi's and Uber drivers couldn't get to a lot of places because several streets were closed because the traffic lights were out, and also just the traffic alone was horrendous. So, we walked.
But we saw a lot of really cool things on the way, one of which was the Flat Iron Building, which the boys wouldn't have seen at all if we didn't take that walk.
But the most amazing thing was we got to witness Manhattanhenge, which is a phenomena that only happens twice a year and only lasts a couple of minutes when it does happen. We had no idea that was happening that night, and we would have completely missed it if the subways were working. Such a sweet and amazing tender mercy.
Manhattanhenge, also called the Manhattan Solstice, is an event during which the setting sun or the rising sun is aligned with the east–west streets of the main street grid of Manhattan, New York City. The sunsets and sunrises each align twice a year, on dates evenly spaced around the summer solstice and winter solstice. The sunset alignments occur around May 28 and July 13. The sunrise alignments occur around December 5 and January 8. We got to see it the night of July 13.
After nearly 30 years of walking, we made it! We had called ahead to see if the Black Out had effected the Empire State Building at all, the last place I would want to be during a black out is stuck in an elevator 102 stories up, but we were reassured that they hadn't been effected by the black out at all.
And that was our last night in the big city, leave it to New York to send us off with an adventure. The next morning we all piled into a rented 13 passenger van and our brave leader, Ricky, drove us out of the city and on to Boston.
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