To live there

New York is sweet.

After a mere three days in New Haven--one trip to the beach and 16 hours in the archives--we returned to the city of many monikers to have another go at it. Now that we're back in the have', everything we did in NYC has gotten muddled together in my mind and, rather unhelpfully, on our camera. Thus, there is no real narrative to be salvaged from what follows. Where there is one, I may have taken some artistic liberties in splicing together mornings and afternoons that never met, pasting orphaned events wherever I find room. I'm sure you don't mind.

The Columbia archives were beautiful, so much so that we forgot to take any pictures of the library or the campus. I assure you, though, the buildings were breathtaking--take a look at someone else's rendering here.


We stayed in three different hotels in four days. I wish it was because we were on the run from the authorities or something equally illicit, but alas it's only because we kept extending our length of stay and grabbing the best hotel deal we could find. The first two nights were spent at the Belnord Hotel. One travel review described it as "laughably small", and I can't think of a better descriptor for this:







Brian's fingertips are about a foot away from the wall on either side, and the room is a square. The bathroom door was about two feet wide, to the point that we weren't even certain we had a bathroom when we first arrived. I found it by opening what appeared to be the closet. Inside, one could brush one's teeth on the toilet and spit into the sink without getting up. One could. If one was so inclined. In any case, no complaints here. The room was cheap, the location was terrific and things were spotlessly clean and reasonably comfortable. We weren't in New York to hang around in a hotel room anyway.


We discovered a great deli / cafe called Zabar's down the street from us, and had our breakfast (bagel and cream cheese, where the bagel to cream cheese ratio is roughly 1:1) and delicious coffee each morning before the archives. Patrons sit at a big, communal table and listen to each other's conversations. At least, that's what we did.


After working--which only took a day and a half--we shopped and gawked up and down Broadway and 5th Avenue. We saw lots of this:





And this:







We saw about one quarter of Central Park. It was both astonishing and depressing: astonishing for all of the expected reasons (lush, bustling, alive in every sense, HUGE) and depressing because all I wanted to do was rollerblade for hours there, but then I'd have to live there, and to do that I'd have to win the lottery or exploit other people and we don't buy lottery tickets and we haven't figured out how best to exploit other people without feeling guilty.

After the first two days, we gave in and started riding the subway if we needed to traverse an area we'd already seen. We really like subways. We really don't understand why it's $2 to ride the subway in New York and $3 to ride the bus in Ottawa.

We also like the fact that the Times Square area has been taken over by pedestrians and lawn chairs. A few sections of the main thoroughfares are closed to cars and (affronted) cabdrivers, and are instead lined with rubber lawn chairs for people to use as they see fit. You can read about it here, or just have a look at our picture and make up your own news story.

We did a lot of vintage shopping (not to be confused with vintage buying), and the best to be had was in Williamsburg (or "Billyburg"), the "hipster capital of the world" according to my dear brother.

We also went to the UN Plaza to check it out. Surprise! We didn't pay to get in. We just milled around the free parts and complained to ourselves about the fact that it costs money to see the UN. Are you tired of us yet? The old "we were too cheap" theme must be getting a bit boring by now, but perhaps these neato pictures of the UN building will buy us some more of your patience:

We checked out the super-trendy Meatpacking District one evening, and as luck would have it our visit followed the much-anticipated opening of High Line Park, an elevated railway-turned-greenspace.

We walked the romantic, lit-up garden paths, tummies grumbling, and descended into the Meatpacking District for dinner. Finding the choices in that area too expensive, too hoity-toity and frankly too packed (it's really trendy), we walked a bit further to Wilfie & Nell's, a new pub recently reviewed in New York Magazine, and were rewarded for doing so. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with some far-out cheese I can't remember the name of and some grainy mustard, Brian had a plate of pork sliders, and we shared a plate of pickles and a basket of dark, handcut fries with malt vinegar. I wish I could eat that food again, and if I could, I'd share it with you. I wouldn't share the Brooklyn Reserve beer we fell in love with, especially now that we found out it's only available in bars, on tap.

We went to a stand-up comedy open mic one evening. We got picked on the whole time. New Yorkers associate one thing in particular with Nova Scotia: Salmon. That is, the salmon they slap on top of bagel lox.

Friday night was turning into a bit of a bust when things took a sudden twist. We'd spent part of the day in Williamsburg, but it was getting a bit rainy and dull, and we were losing energy. We ate a rather early dinner at a pizza place boasting a "best pizza in NYC" article from City Search in its front window, and headed back to our hotel room with half-baked plans to see a movie. While checking movie times, we peeked at the prices and schedules of broadway plays. The 39 Steps was playing in an hour, and there was a little notice that said the theatre offered Student Rush tickets for $26 two hours before the show. We got spiffed up and raced out the door and around the block. The ticket guy explained that students had to show up two hours prior to the show and that the student rush tickets were gone; we'd have to pay $114 like everyone else. But in the end, I worked my magic and snagged us two cheap seats. The play was a riot, and I don't even really like plays.

We went back to Williamsburg on Saturday. That place is so annoyingly cool. Its main street was shut down for a street sale, part of the first annual Northside Festival, and it was busy with big people and baby people and four-legged people, on foot, on wheels and in various states of hygiene. It's cool because this is what a mall looks like:

It's cool because people take time to do stuff like this:

We did more--there was window shopping and afternoon pints in Brooklyn and Dragon Bowls in the East Village; there was real shopping in Greenwich and Chelsea; there was a LOT more walking; there were candied pecans at Max Brenner, the Chocolate Man; there were 4" thick, $14 sandwiches at Katz's deli; there were huge, chewy ginger cookies at Union Square Market; there was a guy playing a theremin somewhere near the ballet; there was cart food and huddling under scaffolding to get out of the rain. There was a sign that needed to be photographed and shared with all of you shvartz-heads:

Shvartz! The name of a bum/poo doctor! Somebody up there likes me. The weather was fantastic half of the time, and miserably drizzly the rest, but it hardly mattered except toward the end. We usually left our room at 9 and returned at midnight, falling into bed and sleeping like big, well-fed, money-spendin', city-lovin' babies.

That's all I can remember for now, but come back in a few days to see all of our pictures, sans story. Until then, here's the view from last night's hotel room:

Hardly made a dent

I don't even know how to start this post. I was told when I got to New York, my head was going to explode. It didn't, thank god, but it came close. We drove to Mamaroneck at 7am and hopped on the 8:26am train, which dumped us at Grand Central around 9:15. After failing to get Saturday Night Live tickets (they're not filming right now) and abandoning the worst, rock-hard pretzel from a cart, we grabbed breakfast at a little cafe (egg and sausage on a roll for B, Challah french toast for me--$8) and started walking. I can't tell you every little thing we did because there is just TOO much! 

For the most part, we just walked and walked and walked for TWELVE hours (hence the excruciating blisters we both have on the tender bottoms of our feet), and along the way we saw:

- 5th Ave.

- Rockefeller Plaza (i.e., 30 Rock)

- Greenwich Village (thumbs up)

- Statue of Liberty (from Battery Park)

- Financial District (and Ground Zero)

- Tribeca ('Triangle Below Canal'--thanks, friendly lady)

- Lower East Side (thumbs way up)

- Empire State Building (obviously we didn't go in; we just gawked at it from outside):

- Magnolia Bakery froim Sex & The City

- Little Italy (awesome):

Beyond this:

I ate my VERY FIRST CANNOLI! I have been dying to eat one of these but I always had a feeling I'd end up in New York one day. I found out where to get 'em best (Ferrara, apparently, although they were $3 and there were equally large ones for 99 cents just a few steps away) and indulged, sharing half with B only because I was already full of sandwich. Otherwise, sucka woulda been on his own.

We also shopped (of note: Fishs Eddy for dishes, Brooklyn Industries for neat clothes/bags etc., Joseph Hanna for leather goods), but I didn't buy anything! What's wrong with me? We rode the subway once toward the end of the night, and had some excellent beer and wood fired meat for dinner, and we made friends with one nice lady in Greenwich (who tipped us off to a street market) and a chatty Syrian fellow in a leather shop, who decided he "really liked us", and encouraged us to watch Bill Maher and come back to get Brian's leather satchel polished in three months. 

But in a whole day of walking and gawking, we hardly made a tooth-mark in the Big Apple. We still have about 7/8ths of the city left to explore, and even that's only a cursory pass through the main thoroughfares. They say you can live in NYC your whole life and never see everything, and we believe it now. Neither of us wanted to leave, and we woke up this morning wishing we were still there... and, of course, that there was a miracle remedy for blisters.

I'll post all of our photos later, on Picasa.

Here and there

It seems like it's been far more than 6 days since we left Ottawa in our rented Ford Focus, but alas, that's all the time that has passed. I haven't written anything yet because I've been waiting for something worth documenting--something I just can't wait to share--and as yet, it hasn't really happpened.

Well, OK, so we've had a bit of fun here and there, but I'm used to more fun than this (remember California? And the UK? It only took a matter of minutes in each place before crazy things started happening to us!). In any case, here's the Reader's Digest version of this first week of our trip, only you don't have to go to the doctor's office or your grandma's bathroom to read it. 

We got up early Saturday morning, picked up our car from Budget--a 4-door, black, Ford Focus with Satellite Radio (good) and all kinds of little things wrong with it (a.k.a. Ford)--and hit the road. Well, we almost hit the road, except that I brought the sleeve my passport usually travels in, only my passport was still mingling in a drawer with the underpants that didn't make the suitcase cut (wedgie-makers and ripped cotton numbers are for local use only). So, we turned around and I talked a blue streak until my passport was secured and we were going in the right direction on the 417. We crossed through Cornwall and got the full search from a surly young woman who kept calling Brian's dissertation a "paper" (to which Brian would softly retort 'It's a book. A book.'). We ate a packed lunch on the road--fresh French Baker croissants, procured that morning, stuffed with ham and provolone and washed down with Fresca--and arrived in Burlington, Vermont around 2:30pm. It was a really cute, lively town and it didn't take us long to decide we liked it, could live there if pressed, and were reminded a bit of Santa Cruz. 

We dropped our things at the hotel and headed downtown. We parked the car in a garage and were pulled by some force of nature into Ben & Jerry's, where I found oatmeal cookie dough ice cream, which is the supreme combination of two of my favourite foods in the whole world: oatmeal and ice cream. 

Cones in hand, we just walked around, shopped and explored until we were hungry again, and we stopped for a late dinner at American Flatbread Company. The meal was delicious--one flatbread (a pizza, really) was topped with pickled grapes, baby spinach, shallots, mild blue cheese, fennel, and pollen-infused honey. It was to die for, especially alongside a New Vermont sausage flatbread and paired with a half pint of beer brewed on the spot. 

We returned to the hotel and tried to go swimming, a must-do for me at every hotel... ever... but the pool was full of rowdy little boys, apparently there for a soccer tournament and whose parents had understandably dumped them in the water for some personal respite. We decided to come back in an hour, but once we holed up in the hotel room, I conked out at 8pm. As a result, I woke up at 5:30am. Bored, I hit up the gym, came back for Brian at 7, and we both took a dip in the pool and hot tub. Ready for the next leg of the trip, we packed up and went out for coffee.

We continued to Brattleboro (cute little artist town, but kinda boring if you're just passing through) for lunch, and drove through Springfield, Massachusetts just to check it out. It was SO depressing. It was just row upon row of old, empty factories, shitty houses and big, beautiful buildings that are now abandoned. This happens to so many cities in the U.S.--the local industries collapse, the city empties out, people move to the suburbs, and all the amazing buildings go to waste.Poor people stay in the city, the urban area's tax base is depleted, and the place can't even pay to have grass on the meridians or get the crosswalks freshly painted. It's just such a bummer. Both of us felt like we'd been punched in the face as we pulled back onto the highway. 

We kept going and hit New Haven around 5pm. Taylor, the guy whose apartment we're staying in, left us by 5:15. He had his car packed up and ready to go, so he just took off after doing that thing we all do before a trip, pacing around and clapping your hands and talking to yourself about things you might have forgotten and things you definitely have packed. He'd left us a bottle of wine. 

We were starving and couldn't deal with finding a nice restaurant (nor paying for one... it is us after all), so instead of settling in right away, we grabbed Subway around the corner. Once we were fed, we drove out to Trader Joe's (a supermarket we loved in California, but here it kinda sucks), and then to Shop Rite for groceries. It was... different. There is just SO much processed food in these stores! Some of it was exciting (like the peanut butter Puffins cereal I found) but some of it was disturbing (like the 10-ft-long deli case of different kinds of hotdogs). Much to my disappointment, fresh pitas are nowhere to be found. They do, however, have 1L containers of Fluff (the marshmallow miracle summoned from heaven just a little bit away in Massachussetts), and soda (not POP, you crazy Canucks) in flavours I can't even comprehend.

After that first night, things got a little boring. Brian went to the archives all day and I sat and transcribed interviews or worked on proposal stuff. To keep busy and active, I've been walking Brian to the archives in the morning and then going for a little jog, and twice I've walked over to East Rock Park and climbed to the summit. One way of doing this is up "Giant Steps", which are, literally, giant steps to the top. Another is scrambling up a winding trail. It's a very short hike, but the views are nice and it made for a good hour of recreation before work. 

For the rest of this week, that's pretty much what we did, except that on Thursday we started a new routine: I'll work in the mornings, meet Brian after lunch at the archives, and then help him research for the afternoon. I'm privy to his research enough that I can scan all of the old letters, memos and other documents for the information he needs. For the last little while I've been snooping in this guy's affairs: 

As a result, I've been thinking about his life constantly, imagining him riding the train, sitting around at Yale, using the same chairs and tables and door handles and lamps, walking on the same floor tiles, peering through the same windows and never imagining we'd have guys walking on the moon, restless leg syndrome, or reality TV. He would, however, have been alive to experience Marshmallow Fluff, and I'm amused by the thought of it getting stuck in his moustache.