The theme of my trip to Philly: “Treat Yo Self!” For those of you who don’t know the reference, it comes from Parks and Recreation. Two short clips are below to give you a glimpse of the principle.

The purpose of my trip was to visit a very good friend of mine who I happen to work with, Tanisha. She is working a 6-month stint in Philly so we had been talking about doing a day trip to mainly walk around and eat. The danger is that we are both enablers, I make Tanisha eat a lot and she makes me spend a lot; it becomes a day to treat ourselves…

The day started at 30th Street Station where I met Tanisha as she excitedly informed me of our many plans for the day. Since I’ve been there before, I was fine with whatever and gratefully told her I wouldn’t mind walking around and eating all day!

And then the walking began. We pretty much saw everything, by foot, which was good since we were working off the calories. So we headed over to the Art Museum first to do the traditional Rocky “run” up the steps. This experience was much better than my last one (Last time, it was 2am with my brother and some college friends and when we got to the top, all we saw were a bunch of couples making out in their car; not sure if anyone else has had that experience but it was awkward… )

Here we are in our conquering pose:

Then we walked the long way down to City Hall which you can see below so understandably I was hungry.

Tanisha was all about stopping at a Belgian waffle place but it was far away so I convinced her to stop in at a bakery for a snack. It is called Swiss Haus!

This was pretty exciting but we decided to contain ourselves slightly since we still had so much food to eat! We got a sampling of a few cookies that were all good but my favorite was the Raspberry Horseshoe. I had never seen one before but it is like phyllo dough literally in the shape of a horseshoe filled with raspberry jam/filling. It was quite enjoyable.

This gave us the strength to walk on and head toward the Belgian waffles. We continued to be distracted by many places including Starbucks, the Apple Store and Tiffany’s (they had a nice bathroom )

One more snack included our Philly pretzel which was incredible and it came with cheese AND it was SO cheap. This has to happen on any trip you take to Philly.

After the distractions, we finally made it to Bonte… Tanisha had been waiting all day for this and it was worth it! A peanut butter and apple cinnamon waffle and a Mexican Coke.

And then, another fun surprise, at least for me. Tanisha said she knew of an amazing foodie hot spot and oh how right she was: Reading Terminal Market.

It reminded me of Union Market in DC but A LOT more packed and slightly more authentic for the time being; something much more for the “common man.” I know Union Market was recently refurbished but it has potential.

Here are some of their jellies and spreads! They even had mini-bottles, enough to entice Tanisha to make a purchase.

And another purchase.

And finally, the whole day of events accumulated into our journey for cheesesteaks; I know, typical. We got to enjoy some classic Philly streets which I’ve always liked and made our way to Pat’s! I usually get a steak from Pat’s and Geno’s but today there was too much food as you can see so we just split one.

By the way, I want to try this place (Milkboy) next time!

As you can see, Philly has so much more good looking food places then just cheesesteaks but even if that was all they had, that would be enough to carry it! And I’m sure Tanisha would love to host some more food outings! Make sure you save up before the trip though.