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Thursday, December 11, 2003: Three Days in New York
Thursday in New York was a day of much aimless wandering. We were ostensibly looking for a charger for the cell phone, but really, would you pay American money for a charger for a phone you're going to cancel soon anyway? It was a McGuffin. So we walked all up Broadway and around about, and it was very unsatisfying for reasons I have already discussed. We didn't have any activities all day, and we didn't meet up with any friends although we thought we might, which is kind of why we didn't plan any activities. After we wandered, we went back to the hotel in the afternoon, and then went to Rosario's Pizza ("Best Pizza in the City"!) which was also disappointing. Crap day, all in all, although Blake and I did sit and talk about what we were and weren't enjoying about the vacation, and what we should do differently next time we go away somewhere. Friday redeemed Thursday. We had planned to go to BurritoVille for breakfast, but when we got there it was only 10:00 or so, and the restaurant didn't open until 11:00. Instead, we went across the street to the Second Avenue Deli, which is a really charming little place. We set Delphine up in a high chair again, and she was a hit with the staff. I had fried matzo (because how often do you see that on a menu?) and applesauce, and I shared my applesauce with Delphine, making it her first restaurant food. She loved it. Then we took the subway uptown to meet Joy and guppy and Columbine at Sephora. Joy and guppy were already there, and Col showed up almost immediately after we did, and we decided to head to the Comfort Diner for lunch. It took a while to find the place (apparently it moves around) but we did. Lunch was nice; it was cool to hang out with Joy and guppy and Columbine, although I didn't feel the magical chemistry I always hope for when I meet Suspects. I actually never feel the magical chemistry I hope for -- I always hope that I'll get along like a house on fire with whoever I'm meeting, that we'll laugh and cry and have eight hundred things in common, that we'll finish one another's sentences and understand each other perfectly. Oddly enough, that never happens. It came pretty close when Columbine and Debbie came to Toronto and we went out for lunch -- we're all pretty much on the same page and they turned out to be incredibly easy to be with. After lunch (I had a tasty burger and fries) we all took the train downtown again, briefly visited the hotel to change Delphine, and then I can't really remember what happened. I do know we ended up at a cafe opposite the Lower East Side Tenement Museum called 88 Orchard. The cafe was great -- they had all kinds of tea, lattes, and astonishing hot chocolate, and also the coolest washroom I had been to in New York. I was sorry we hadn't discovered the cafe earlier so we could go again. After coffee, sadly, it was time for dinner. (I think we all agreed there was too much eatin' and not enough time to get hungry that day.) Dinner was at a barbeque restaurant, and we met a whole bunch of other Suspects there, maya, Iko and Mike, and Julie. There was good food and good drinks and good chitchat. After dinner, we walked with maya and Julie to the gelato place, but it was disappointingly closed (at 11:00? What the?) So we all split off and went home, and that was the end of Friday. Saturday was the day we went home. Originally we had a 12:30 flight, but Air Canada arbitrarily changed it to 3:30, which wasn't so bad as it turned out. Since the flight was so late in the day, we had time to go up to Douglas and Tanya's neighbourhood, Harlem, for breakfast. They have an apartment in a cool old building, with marble stairwells and mosaic tile floors and a little wee elevator. Their neighbours are beautiful old brownstones, some burned out and gutted, some renovated and sumptuous. A neighbourhood very much in transition. We had breakfast at a little... I guess it's called soul food restaurant. It was a family-run restaurant, and the server was a little guy, maybe 9 years old. We all had one of those Big Breakfasts with lots of options, and the little guy wrote each. option. down. longhand. Slowly, because he's 9. It was really cute. And after he'd finished taking down the order, he had to read all our orders back to us. I had sausage, which surprisingly came in patties, and grits, which surprisingly were white, not yellow (I'd never had grits before but I'd imagined they were yellow, like polenta), and toast and eggs. The perfect sustenance for a day of travel, which requires much fortification. Douglas and Tanya had told us about a bus from Harlem to La Guardia which, they said, only took half an hour. I kind of didn't believe them, but $4 for a bus is way better than $70 for a car, so we thought we'd try it. So there we were with four backpacks, a stroller and a baby, catching a bus in Harlem. It's a good thing it was Harlem, where people are a good deal more helpful, patient and polite than the rest of Manhattan, or it would have been ugly. As it was, a lady held Delphine while we got ourself sorted out, and no-one was mad that we were taking up so much space. And that's pretty much the end. We got to the airport okay, got home okay, and it was nice to be back. The first thing we did when we got home was go to Starbucks, which seems like an odd thing to do when you get home from the US, but our Starbucks really means the home neighbourhood to me. |