I was out with a friend, her son, and Kaia today for an outing to Arthur Avenue, aka Little Italy in the Bronx, and the Bronx Zoo today. We ate lunch at an Albanian restaurant Chris took us to a while back, and then we made our way around the Little Italy area so I could show her some of my favorite spots. Lucky me, I also got all four of us free tickets to visit the Bronx Zoo today, courtesy of a parent in Kaia’s class who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society. So the day ended up being quite inexpensive for New York City!

While hanging out today, my friend let me know that she, her partner, and son did a day trip to Fort Lee yesterday, after I had told her about the big Korean population there, and hence the delicious, authentic Korean food. They took an Uber over there and spent about half the day exploring. They ate at a local restaurant and were blown away by the food. She and her partner especially loved the banchan dishes that came out at the beginning of the meal, all complimentary.

“You know, this is all really thanks to you that we are branching out of just eating Turkish, French, and Italian foods,” my friend said to me. “We’re so much more adventurous now because of your influence! I started experimenting with more food, and now I am getting S out of his comfort zone. And he really, really enjoyed the Korean meal far more than I expected! He was still talking about it this morning!”

This made me so happy; it probably was the one comment she said to me that truly made my day. I love it when I hear about people — anyone really — taking my recommendations on anything from food, restaurants, sights to see, tours, places to visit. For me, it’s the biggest compliment. Everyone has so many choices they can make in a single day, so for someone to take my suggestion/advice seriously and actually carry it all the way through, it always makes me feel ecstatic. It was already a compliment months ago when she said she started exploring more cuisines because of me. But when she said that her partner, who is notoriously picky and narrow in his food choices, actually was willing and embraced Korean food, I just sat there in shock and joy.

I recently read an article about how you can get people to like you. And one of the ways it mentioned was to tell people when something reminded you of them, or tell them when you did something that was at their recommendation. This is 1000000000% true. But this is only true if you already liked them at least a little.