Let’s go downtown!

Today I went to Ithaca Commons, which is a small pedestrian mall consisting of only a few roads.

The main street (State Street)

While pedestrian zones are pretty common in European city centers, it seems to be more special here. There are some nice stores, but most of it is souvenirs, gourmet food and other expensive things. I picked up some maps at the tourist information and explored some of the shops. There is a pretty cool second hand bookstore called, “Autumn Leaves Used Books”.

Afterwards I went to Purity, a great ice cream place!! Curious about how sherbet would taste like, I got one scoop of “Rainbow Sherbet”. I loved it – it was orange flavored and really refreshing. The scoop was really gigantic- equivalent to 2-3 scoops in Germany. Well, I guess everything is huge here.. It was 80°F (27°C) today, so perfect ice cream weather! I went down to the lake again, as the ice cream place is at a busy crossing (which for some reason doesn’t keep most people from sitting there though).

How an American ice cream place looks like

I ate half of it already and it’s still huge 😀