Monday, September 6, 2010

Adventures: 2008 - Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Garza here and back with another installment of my Adventures series :-).

Today we learn about Bethlehem, PA and the goodness that is "Christmas City, USA". Bethlehem is about an hour and a half NW of Philadelphia and about an hour and a half West of New York City. It has a small town feel to it and the residents are incredibly friendly and it definitely has all the goodness associated with East Coast food. The view from my 6th floor apartment on the hill overlooking Bethlehem was breathtaking! To the left was downtown Bethlehem and the preserved buildings from the Colonial era with Moravian University, Est 1742, anchoring the north side of downtown.

Main Street Commons Building
In the middle of my view was the Lehigh River and the adjacent old Bethlehem Steel Mill which now stands idle. Bethlehem Steel made the Golden Gate Bridge and over 1127 ships during WWII.  It ran for 130 years and during that time over 600 employees died! That is over 4.5 employees per year or about 1 every 2 1/2 months for 130 years straight... wow! Can someone say OSHA? Wow!


Bethlehem Steel sits idle as a casino is built on the old site

Bethlehem Steel lit up to shoot the opening scene in Transformers 2.


Lots of pyrotechnics and helicopters flying during filming
To the right of Bethlehem Steel on the foot of South Mountain, which rises up on the other side of Lehigh River, stands Lehigh University, Est 1865. Lehigh's Undergraduate Accounting program is ranked #1 in the nation by Business Week. As you look to the right you see more of South Mountain and South Bethlehem. Above South Bethlehem at the top of South Mountain, shining all year round for all to see, stands the 90 foot Star of Bethlehem! A beautiful sight to see! If you ever need to know where you are when in the area, just look to the Star of Bethlehem for guidance.

 
A short walk from my apartment is downtown Bethlehem and all sorts of eating goodness. When you hear about East Coast sandwiches, well this is what they are talking about: This is from Hometown Heros, located near downtown Bethlehem and is a monster sandwich maker and bar. My personal favorite is the one pictured here, a homemade roast beef, sliced fresh with cheese and mushroom. The one here is only 1/4 size and even at that a normal person should eat only half! Sandwiches don't come any better than this! Don't even mention sides, why would you ask for a side when you have such a monster sandwich, and not just a monster sandwich, but a mouth watering, incredibly delicious as you sink your teeth into grandma-couldn't-make-it-better roast beef?

Closer to downtown was my favorite place for pizza and calzones: Nick's Pizza located at Union and Main Street.
Oh yeah, so if you want some beer to go and you're having dinner, then you want to be in Pennsylvania. Because in PA, you can grab a six pack to go in your favorite restaurant like Nick's. That is pretty cool. But back to the pizza and calzone... Classic East Coast goodness with perfect dough, the sauce is flavorful, the cheese is real and chewy and the Italian Sausage is cooked up fresh. My kind of place. And if you want Spaghetti, get ready for a plate that would amply and easily feed a family of 4 (and with a pair of meatballs that are about the size of tennis balls).

In the middle of Main Street in downtown Bethlehem stands an incredible testament to Italian cooking... Mama Nina's! Owned by Nino and Nina and with the help of their son Vinnie, Mama Nina's serves up not just great Pizza itself, but also has some of the best pasta dishes I have ever eaten. Seafood is plentiful on the East Coast and there is much to choose from here. The Seafood Combination is great, but let me also recommend the Pasta al Forno. The Pasta al Forno is great both at Mama Nina's and at their son's place (his name is Salvadore) in South Bethlehem: Sal's. Mama Nina's is a little more upscale while Sal's caters more to the student crowd of Lehigh U. Either way, both have great food!


Mama Nina
The BEST Italian food I've ever had!!!!









Mama Nina's on Main Street, Bethlehem, PA
So much more Good Eats to talk about when you talk about Bethlehem, like the Apollo Grill which has the best appetizers and arguably the best American food in the area, as well as Billie's, the best breakfast to be had in Bethlehem. I only wish I had the pics to prove it! :-) But trust me, if you find yourself in the area, check those out, they are incredible and you won't regret a moment of it... ever!!!! :-D

Ok, enough for today.... this took a while to put together and now time to rest.

Hope everyone had a great Labor Day!

Adventures: 2000ish - Vermont

So Garza loves food. I mean really really really loves food. Garza's 3rd career after Engineering and Teaching will be that of an awesome Chef! So is there any doubt that back in the 2000ish time frame, while working for Compaq and I was sent up to Vermont for a 1 week training course with IBM to learn how to use the software tools we would be using, that the pictures I returned with would pretty much be about food? LOL!!! Guess not! :-D

The trip wasn't all great, in fact it started out horrible! I was running a little late for my flight but not too much, but when I went to check in at Continental, they told me I was flying on Northwest! The ticket was booked "Continental" but with Northwest as their "agent" or some 'crap' like that. So this is Houston International so I had to go to another terminal for Northwest. So I get there and the check-in agent tells me to take my bag to the plane and they'll check it in there, because they are getting ready to close the door on the plane. Sounds reasonable. But when I get to security, do they let me pass with my oversize bag.... Noooooooooo. They say take my bag back to the counter to check it in there and that I can't take it to the gate. Crap.... Long story short, I miss the flight. So the plan was to fly  up to Maine with co-worker Renee, get the car rental, find a friend of hers from college and have dinner then drive to Burlington, VT. Crap crap crap!!! So I take a later flight and get there a couple hours later than her. (As a side note, I was able to get a message to her via an in-flight message that apparently she thought was the coolest thing ever. And if you think about it, how many people ever get an in-flight message? Very very rare!) Cool for her, but as for me, I'm stuck without a rental, but at least I'm flying directly into Burlington,VT. So I missed dinner with Renee and her friend and what I heard was awesome Maine Clam Chowder. But somehow I made it up to myself with a nice deal on dinner called Double Lobster!!!! Yes, Double Lobster with a potato and just $19.99!!!! Awesome deal on lobster up east, I highly recommend it:

Double Lobster lunch for $19.99! Too good to pass up!
So I get to the hotel and being the incredibly nice person I am, I charm up the check-in clerk into upgrading my room to one with a view of Lake Champlain.... gorgeous lake and a gorgeous view!!!!


Looking out at the lake during the day, you see a lake full of sailboats and you just want to skip whatever you have planned and go make friends with whoever you can just to sail on the cool waters of Lake Champlain.... ahhhhhhhhhh..... :-)



So the IBM training went well and after a couple days I got a chance to tour the Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream factory which is based in Burlington, VT! It was a lot smaller than I would have imagined, but it was also way cooler than anything I could have imagined.

They have a conveyor belt that brings the pint cup (upside down) and at the last second turns them over to be filled. Well, a snafu happens and the lids aren't being placed on top. Then there's a rush to pull the pints off the conveyor belt. Pretty funny.... And then there are the tasters, yes, one of the best and most sought after jobs in the nation... Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream taster! These guys were huge, I mean really huge. They had been doing this for a while and it showed. And there wasn't another job they'd do for a million bucks! I learned a lot about Ben & Jerry's that day: All natural, only comes in pints, the most popular flavor at the time: Cherry Garcia, they donate 10% of profits to help the environment, and the goodness just went on and on. Ben & Jerry's: Good Eats!!!!!



Then there was the trip to the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory. Some wonderful bears made in Vermont. Not the softest, not the cutest, but they come with a lifetime guarantee and it's hard to beat the packaging! Should your bear EVER need medical attention, simply mail it to them and they will repair your bear.... for FREE! And your bear is sent back in a medical gown! Yes, so if he gets his eyes gnawed off by fido, not a problem! Great for anniversaries or gifts that are meant to last a long time, if not a lifetime. 














You see me in the photo: I'm at the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory hamming it up with one of the statuaries they have and in the other photo I have the bear I'm buying while trying to answer trivia for a prize during the tour.... :-) ...   I LOVE TEDDY BEARS!!!!!!
We also made it up to Montreal for a quick lunch, pretty much just so we could say we had lunch in Montreal! A mere 2 hr drive for lunch wasn't bad at all! At one point we had to take a ferry across the lake, and this is one of my favorite photos of me:
The lighting on this pic is awesome!


The best restaurant in Burlington, VT
But now for the main event, the best meal of all!!!! Turns out that Burlington is also home to one heck of a culinary school by the name of New England Culinary Institute or NECI for short. It is a 4 year culinary school and they take their cooking seriously! No fooling around here. In addition to the school, they also run a restaurant that is obviously very 
popular.

It's a 2 story school/restaurant with the main dining upstairs and bakery / desserts downstairs. We sat upstairs with a view of some of the students making cakes.
The Dessert Crew... Papa Chef is in the Big Hat!
There was a big plate glass window that made viewing them easy. Some students were having problems frosting their cake. Well.... not good for a culinary school. In walks papa chef, you could tell by the tall hat! And papa wasn't happy with what he saw. He promptly picked up the cake one student was working on and quickly removed the frosting on it with a few flicks of his wrists. He then beings TWIRLING the cake with one hand and quickly frosted it with the other.

I forget where I stole the Chef hat from, but I was happy!!!

Quite an awesome show and no doubt quite the education for the student. The pic on the left below is of the very students and the papa chef with the cake. They were very kind in letting get a picture with them. The one on the right is downstairs, the desserts and pastry students... somehow I managed to steal a CHEF hat from somewhere... :-)!!!
Awesome Food!!!!!

And to finish off the trip to Burlington, Vt there was the small affair of attending the wedding of a co-worker who we had just starting working with down in Houston, TX ... Jeff Brown who was marrying Ginger! Wow, what are the odds that on a trip like this it would match up randomly in the same place and same time as that wedding? I shoulda bought a lottery ticket! LOL!! :-)

An absolutely beautiful wedding in a tiny church, over 200 years old and the weather was perfect ... in September you know! The perfect time to be in Vermont with the Maple trees turning colors and the breeze as perfect as you can imagine ...


And that was Vermont.... stay tuned for more adventures!!!

Garza's Picasa Web Album: Vermont Trip - 2000ish

Who I am, the short story... :-)

Hi, Garza here with some background info that you may want to have, it'll help with the perspective of these posts and what not that will follow. First off, this is me below, cheesy and fun and always always always looking to have fun and smile with friends!
 





















I am first and foremost the proud father of 'Mojo', my son who will be a regular feature of my blog. He, no doubt, will go on to do great things in this world. He is 3, already an avid Linux user (Ubuntu 10.04 currently on my ACER Laptop!)
 





and has mastered my Android phone (Samsung Moment) to the point of showing me how he added a shortcut to directly play the "Shuffle All" mix of my mp3s after I spent days and days unsuccessfully trying to figure it out myself. It took him all of 5 seconds to show me when I finally broke down and asked him how he had added that shortcut to "his" desktop on the phone (we share "desktop" space on the Android, there are 5, he has 3 while I kept 2 for myself). I love my son!!!!! :-)


I am an Electrical Engineer, having earned my BS from the University of Texas at San Antonio (Go Roadrunners!!!).
I have designed computer chips for Compaq and Hewlett Packard as well as designed Voice and Text Services for the Telecom Industry (kgb baby!!!!). I am currently residing in Wichita, KS while a grad student at Wichita State University (Go Shockers!!!). I didn't know that wheat is collected in "Shocks" and I absolutely did not know what the "Shocker" was until I got to Wichita. :-O    Hilarious!!! But I digress.... ;-) ... So yes I am a grad student and I am looking to now become a high school math teacher. This career is one I have thought of doing for a long time and now that I have my son I can't think of a career that more perfectly complements my spending time with him!




Education is my passion and one of my hobbies that ties directly in with my love of education is my collecting of collegiate hoodies. Not just any hoodies, but embroidered hoodies from colleges I have set foot onto...
Colleges for whom I have respect and would enjoy my son to attend some day. My favorites that I have collected thus far are from Harvard, MIT, Georgetown and Texas (Go Longhorns!!!!). On my list to go see and collect include: Stanford, Notre Dame and Santa Cruz (Ok, this one is for the mascot: Slugs!!!). Locally, I have visited K-State but still need to visit KU (Kansas), Nebraska and maybe even Iowa State. 










I enjoy working on cars and just finished tuning up 'Ol Red, my 1999 Dodge Ram 1500. 200k+ miles and rolling like it just came off the factory floor! That is one awesome truck, it has never let me down :-). 'Ol Red has driven from San Antonio to Los Angeles, from Houston to Oklahoma City, from San Antonio to Wichita, from Wichita, KS to Boston, Mass and many many more parts in-between!!! The pic of 'Ol Red below left is circa 2009 while the one on the right is circa 1999. She has held together beautifully!!!! :-)
2009
1999











 



Yes, I am single but looking to settle down .... never been married! Wow, can you believe that! So if you are looking for a very stable, fun and awesome guy, call me at 316-290-....  LOL! :-)  We'll see what happens, but it'll take a really wonderful person for me to settle down with. I can only have the absolute, most wonderful people around my Mojo! :-)

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my blog :-). I want to say hello to my friends and family who have been incredibly supportive of me and my son, Mojo, through thick and thin.

Mojo and me at my Niece's wedding - March 2010