We spent the day at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

Despite having grown up in Baltimore, and with my family having some relatives in the outskirts of Philadelphia, towards the suburbs, I have never actually gone into the city of Philadelphia. Yet with all of my trips to New York City, I have seen this part from a great distance.

My sister bought my mother, other sister, and I tickets to the Philadelphia Flower Show for Christmas, so we geared up on a rainy, windy Sunday to go see what the show had to offer. She’s been buying a lot more experiences lately, and then my elder sister also bought a ticket for my niece to come.

So we drove from Baltimore to Philadelphia for the occasion. One might call it a girls’ trip, or a weekend getaway, even though it was only for the day. Regardless, it was much needed to get away.

The Philadelphia Flower Show was just okay.

We drove up and reserved a parking garage that was a ten minute walk nearby, which turned out to be a mistakes.

It appears that many of the garages were actually cheaper than what we had paid, which means we could have saved like $10 if we had just paid for the garage when we got there. In our ten minute walk to the convention center, we got to spot several sights that were nearby in the town. I took some photos, then we headed inside the convention center.

Now, the right hand portion of the show are all of these pretty flower displays. This is also the majorly crowded part of the flower show, and you can barely see some of the displays unless you push past people.

For example, I was getting so claustrophobic near one of them, which was closer to the wall, because it was basically a constant moving line throughout the display. If you want to stop and take pictures, you’re pretty much holding up the entire line.

The center of the show are displays of like orchids and bonsai, and it was pretty neat to see how they were trimmed or grown to a specific shape. The far lefthand side is a market, and vendors are selling a lot of different services and items. My family loaded up on the snack samples being handed out throughout the show.

There are also food stands scattered throughout the show, but we didn’t buy anything, as we planned to get lunch outside of the place after. We spent a grand total of two hours at the flower show

There’s another section of the show as well, but you had to pay extra for it. We did not, as the tickets were pricy to begin with, but we agreed it was kind of a one and done deal. We were not going to come back in future years because you could barely enjoy the displays, and there weren’t a ton of them to make it worth the price.

Perhaps if we lived in town, but because we were not locals, we thought it was not worth the drive again.

Lunch and bubble tea in Chinatown was delicious.

Before it started raining, we left the show in order to go and get lunch in Chinatown. The restaurant I chose was five minutes away and called Spice C. I was doing my research online, and discovered they had hand pulled noodles, or lan zhou mian.

My mother and oldest sister, who aren’t really receptive to international foods, had to be helped to order by the rest of us. I chose the dumpling hand pulled noodle soup, my other sister a shrimp hand pulled noodle soup, and my niece a chicken hand pulled noodle soup. The other two got stir fried noodles with shrimp.

I thought the noodle soup I got was good! It wasn’t as good as some of the places I have had in Flushing, up in NYC, but for only $10 the price here could not be beat. It was packed with locals throughout our time here, which indicates good things to me as well.

After, we grabbed some boba at Tiger Sugar, then walked back to our car in the rain. It was about a 15 minute walk, but I was paying attention to the shops. It was interesting to see how this Chinatown, too, was being threatened by gentrification—lots of posters were up about it.

We got in our car and drove home after that. It was a pleasant day overall!

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