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connecticut

Emily Knapton

MainSTAML6a81_2024-08-01-06-15-49

It's Thursday. That means it's time for Main Street, Connecticut. When we explore all kinds of fun locations in the towns and cities across our area today, we're in Norwalk. Let's get right to it. News job, Connecticut's Mark. So all is at Iron Ball Mark. Oh, you're ready to do some heavy lifting. Becky. Good morning. Get my, uh, morning workout in here. Tell you what these, these paper towels are kind of heavy. I'm gonna need these later to soak up all the sweat from my, my big workout. You know, my father lifted weights into his eighties for 60 years and I got this big gut and didn't rub off on me. Chris Orfi is here from the bone to you. Ok. Thank you very much tied up to this too. Uh, good morning. How are you? Good, thanks. How you doing? Good. So, uh, tell us about the place. How long you been here? Yes. So we've been around for about, uh, four years now. We, we actually opened our first gym back in 2019 and this is our second location. We opened in 2021. Uh, so actually it would be probably three years we've been open and, um, yeah, it's been, uh, it's been taking off ever since. And, uh, yeah, uh, so, uh, I mean, it looks like you have a lot of people here and I guess what makes it interesting is that you're here 24 hours, is that you're open 24 hours, correct. Yes. So we're staffed from 8 to 10 o'clock and then outside those hours our members get a little key fog so they can pretty much just come to the front door beep in and then come do the workout anytime and it just makes it so much easier. I think the schedule set, you have crazy schedules. You gotta work out when you can. Yeah, we had a lot of people come before work after it's good because it kind of spreads everyone out. Doesn't get too crowd here like you can see right now we're here at what, five or six o'clock and there's a whole bunch of people here and then you'll still have the same thing during the day, later at night. Um, so it gives people the opportunity to kind of come as they need to. And this is, I mean, a real hidden gem if you ask me, I mean you're here in South Norwalk. I mean, uh how did you find this space? Uh We were looking around for quite, for quite a while honestly. And when we found this, we, we thought to like, man, man, this is a perfect spot. The area is really up and coming. They're building a lot of nice new apartments, a lot of nice new buildings coming in the area. So, you know, the one thing you could use is a nice gym. Right? And real quick you got a AAA drink that you're gonna be putting out to. Yes. Correct. So, we're coming our own energy drink within the next two months. It's called VX and, um, it's gonna be in stores around the country. So I'm excited, Chris. Thank you so much. Appreciate chatting with us this morning. That's the deal from here, Becky at our, and we're gonna be heading over to stepping stones in our next hour, Becky. So now listen, don't feel badly about just lifting those paper towel rolls. I'll show you what all your work today has really paid off. Take a look at this. That's true. There you go, Mary. Wow. Look at me. I'm, I'm going to pump you up. You're looking good. All right, we'll let you get back to your workout. Oh, is it?

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MainST7a81_2024-08-01-07-12-54

It's Thursday. That means it's time for main Street, Connecticut. When we explore all kinds of locations and towns and cities across our area today, we're in Norwalk. Let's head over to news 12 Connecticut's Mark Suo, who is at Stepping Stones Museum for Children Park. Well, Becky, you know, there's so much to see and do and learn here at stepping stones and fun things to do. Like play Connect Four with my buddy, photographer Kenny Kensel. You're gonna try to do that, huh? Nail it. Connect four. He, he let me win. Kenny. That was so nice of you to do that, by the way. Uh If you've never been here, there's, there's so much going on and we're going to bring in the man who knows all about it. Robert Towne been here for 12 years. I think you have a pretty good knowledge of what's going on here by now. Uh I noticed that you've got some flag to the country, some Olympic Rings. What's this Olympic tie in? So, overall, right now, we are celebrating what we summer days and stepping stones. And so we have lots of programming that really help us bring you know, people to bring the world basically to Norwalk. You know, so we don't have to right now talking about the Olympics, go all the way to Paris to have people to get an Olympic experience. Children can get that experience right here. And one thing we've been able to see is through our programming right now, we've had people have some Olympian efforts, you know, we see lots of gold medal smiles with all the things they can do here. So it's really, really important for us to make sure that these Children and have so much fun. But learn about the world. It's so important, so great. When the Children get to see the flags of the world, they can talk and learn about the flags of the world. You know, they can learn about the Olympic rings and what those rings stand for and how each color is represented on each flag. And then on top of that, you know, as far as the learning is concerned, they can go out and have a great time by just competing against their friends. You know, everybody walks away with gold medals and it's just this fun thing, fun time here. And what's so great about what you do here is not only is it all interactive but they're learning something. Yes, our mantra is really learning through play. And so, you know, with lots of, lots of hidden learning and obvious fun. So whether you're shooting hoops, right now in basketball and you're learning about different things there or whether it's simply, you know, going in and coloring a flag that represents your background, you know, you can do so many things and Children walk away with these things that are enhanced by all those extension conversations that they have on the way home. When you ask your child, how did you, what did you do today? What happened? They go back and they talk about all these great things and that's part of the learning. You know, it's multigenerational. It's so important for Children to learn on a multigenerational way like this. All right. And uh as we're talking here, I'm gonna go over to the, the basket. You wanna come over here and join me, we gotta get ready to wrap this up. But uh we're coming up on 25 years. So we're gonna make sure we let people know about that. So stepping stones is 25 years old next year, March of 2025 you know, good shot there, you know, two Yon Huskies here. But for 25 years, very, very important for us to celebrate 25 years because we've been serving this wonderful community. One of the ways we want to serve this community, we gotta get going though. One of the ways we got to get going. One of the ways we serves this community, the block is by just having a lot of play based fun here. But also making sure that all Children get the chance. We got all Children get the chance to come to stepping stones. And so one of the ways we do that is by making sure that kids uh.

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MainSt8a81_2024-08-01-08-43-17

It's Thursday. That means it's time for main Street Connecticut. When we explore all kinds of fun locations in towns and cities across our area today, we're in Norwalk. So let's head right over news 12 Connecticut's Mark Sudal who is at Saffron Indian cuisine. W what you got there? Mark. Mm mm. Oh, Becky. Trying to keep cool in this hot weather. This is a delicious homemade mango smoothie with yogurt. Oh, phenomenal. I wanna introduce you to Pinky. Who was so nice to join us this morning and tell us what makes you different than other Indian restaurants. Then first of all, we opened the restaurant for the passion of serving authentic food to the community, which is very hard to find. We make the food with the family recipes over here and the authenticity of the food is maintained in each and every way. We make our own ghee and we use G for all the cooking that we do over here. Tell us about some of the dishes that you put out here. Yes. OK. So this is Palak Paneer or Sag Sagan Pak are two different names for the same thing. So, Punish, I have chicken. Shahi Korma. And I have lamb masala. They are, they are a few of our most popular dishes over here. And I have the garlic Naan rice and they're all made with ghee. There is ghee that goes on top of the naan as well. And, uh, it's, uh, you know, when you try, you will see each dish has its own different, distinct flavor. And lamb and chicken are very popular in your culture. Is that right? Yes. Well, yes, a lot of people are vegetarian but then a lot of people eat meat as well. Right. And what's it been like for you? Uh, since the pandemic, I know the pandemic was tough on folks. Well, we were, we were good during the pandemic because, you know, we've been here, we've been around for almost 15 years now and uh we have a lot of, uh, you know, customers, repeat customers. We never lose our customers. They always come back. So we had, they, they really supported us during the pandemic and people would come in and say, are you doing ok. Oh, I've been praying for you. You know, so that's the kind of customers we have here. They love us. And how many days are you open? We are open every day of the week. On Mondays we open at, I'd otherwise be open for lunch and dinner every day. Wow. Well, of course, I've got to sit down and try all this delicious. I mean, I already enjoyed this fantastic smoothie. And this, this, this looks really amazing to me. Oh, phenomenal. There's chicken. I mean, honestly I've never had Indian food before. Um, the chicken is been now, I do love lamb too. Oh, fantastic. Now, how long did it take me to put all this together? Oh, well, we work on it all day, you know, we do things in, uh, by, by part, you know, in stages. Pinky. I thank you so much. I apologize. I've still got food in my mouth. Becky. Amazing. Amazing. Oh, that all looks great. Smoothie. Fantastic. Thank you, Mark. Thank you to Pinky too.

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News 12 is checking out all of the best summer spots on this Main Street segment.

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