You are what you eat.

Last summer at Central Park, I made friends with Travis. He had a football, and I wanted to play football. It was a seamless friendship. So since I've moved back to the city, pretty much every other weekend, we'll meet at the park and one of our overly outgoing of personalities will recruit two teamfuls of players. I'm usually the only chick so I plea to be taken easy on, but the second I start mouthing off about Tim Tebow, the mercy fades.

This weekend was football-less, however. Instead it was Nia-full. Nia is my college roommate (so if anything, she'd join in the Tebow rant), and she moved up to the city last Thursday. Her Gram lives in Brooklyn so she parked her belongings there, and then headed into Manhattan Friday evening for what would be one of my favorite weekends in a while.

We didn't actually make it out on Friday, just caught up and binge ate Mexican food around the corner from my apartment. Yes, we'll take a refill of chips. A second refill? Sure.

The next morning we were baja fresh and ready to hit the concrete. We headed down to Soho to tease our high taste and wound up on my new favorite street. I don’t know what it’s called, but every door opened to a different interior designer’s gallery. I dare say I’m so much more into interior design than fashion design these days. This may be the start of a horrible decorating habit.

We headed back uptown to meet a few friends for lunch. On the way, I stopped for a pair of sunglasses and a cell phone cover at one of those one-stop shop street vendors where you can get umbrellas, fedoras or iPod accessories (or weed). Ugh, I’m a week too late on the cell phone cover though. I totally shattered the glass on my brand new phone last Sunday in the middle of the night. I wish it were a good story, like the time I almost got eaten by monkeys in Thailand, but sadly it was a case of sleep walking/sleep checking my e-mail, then sleep knocking my phone off my night stand.

Anyways, so we went to lunch, and ordered Mexican, again.

Then it was time for Hard NYC, a music fest featuring MIA. Most of the folk there had probably stopped by that one-stop shop street vendor…but not for umbrellas… or fedoras… or iPod accessories… Not us though, we just kept up the Mexican weekend with some Jose Cuervo. Nia and I danced our hearts out, and Scott kinda just bopped right to left. That flower child part of me was definitely running wild, or maybe it was the Mexican child in me. Either way, it was a rockin’ change of scenery.

Sunday morning, we woke up and like every other Sunday, headed to brunch with the gang. Surprise, surprise when the breakfast burritos came out. The Frying Pan was next (that boat bar on the Hudson River). We sat on the top deck, and our entire conversation basically surrounded how each second we were dripping more and more of sweat. It was a unanimous decision to head back to my place for air-con, and then a unanimous decision to go to Caliente Cab for dinner (yup, Mex.) My downstairs neighbors joined us, and then introduced us to an awesome neighborhood dive bar for some ping pong and pistachios. I’ve never seen anyone 360 in skill as quick as Nia did on the ping pong table.

She became like this:

And that’s that. Nia’s first weekend in NYC.