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For the first day of the new year ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bunny_hugger and I had a plan which was a little bit old --- go up to Manhattan and maybe take in Macy's and the Rockefeller Center tree --- and a little bit new --- meet her brother and his girlfriend. Although he lives in Brooklyn and she had visited him immediately after her first visit out to me, back in 2007, we hadn't had the chance to meet yet. This could be the time.
As in past trips up we took the bus, although there was some delay at the park-and-ride in trying to get the parking machines to accept dollar bills to pay the parking part of the price. It may have been the cold; the whole visit was chilly, although Friday wasn't so bitterly cold as Saturday would be, but in any case the mechanism wasn't taking bills. I had to go back to my car for the strategic quarters reserve.
In Manhattan we started off walking eastward to Bryant Park and I realized we were nearby the local outlet of Japanese bookstore chain Kinokuniya, whose Orchard Road, Singapore, store manages to be infinite in floor space. The Manhattan version doesn't manage that, but I still like dropping in when I can, and we found that they were closed for New Year's Day. Ah well. We headed south to take in what we could of storefront windows at Macy's and at Saks Fifth Avenue (if I remember rightly), which since we found them during the daylight this time around meant we were better able to see what was there, and could take pictures that didn't suffer from being quite so blurrily illegible. I was a little disappointed to find the Macy's displays were the same ones as last year, complete with the same mysterious reproduction of inaccurately-dated and inaccurately-numbered copies of the International Herald Tribune for use as miniature newspapers, but there you go.
Last year we'd gone up the weekend after New Year's and found besides the wonderful array of things that they had closed Santa's Workshop or whatever it is they call it. Even though we were up a week after Christmas I thought it might be near enough the holiday that at least the display of Christmas decorations might still be open, and we found --- after wandering back and forth in the lower levels and getting buffet salad bar lunches which were so satisfying --- that they were closed this year, too. Next year for sure, or maybe we start looking up just when Santaland does stay open.
Visiting Macy's a second year running meant it wasn't quite so much an ongoing set of discoveries, since we had some recollection of where things were from the past year. But we knew to look forward to some of the things, like wandering around the jewelry counter full of things way too expensive for us to buy but neat to see held against bunny_hugger's skin, or the odd sight somewhere around the fifth floor of the McDonald's built into what's supposed to look like a Sort Of Rainforest Tree Or Something diorama.
They also had an expanded set of Nostalgia Toys, things like Vaguely 50s style sheriff stars, or magic slates, or (and this was hard to resist) three-foot tubes of candy. Some of these candies were set to particular decades --- candy of the 50s, 60s, or 80s --- although I don't remember seeing the 70s. And it raises the question of where they got 1950s candy bars from. Are they still making now-obscure brands and we just didn't notice? Did they get the powerful Hershey or Mars factories to produce special runs of imitation classic candies?
Still, the classic 1950s style toys made of real things that don't depend on electronics appealed, and I thought hard about what might be an appropriate gift for my niece, whose birthday is, I believe, in May, or whose adoption day is in August, and of course there's always another Christmas. I made a small purchase of a relatively lightweight gift, which have some curious rebounding side effects. I'll discuss that should it pan out.
As we got closer to the vague time we had planned to meet bunny_hugger's brother and his girlfriend we made telephone contact to set a specific time and location. He proposed the West Fourth subway station and it wasn't until we left Macy's and made our way to the subway that I realized, first, he couldn't have meant Fourth Avenue because Manhattan has a slightly embarrassing lack of a Fourth Avenue, so where were we supposed to meet up? The answer, obvious after actually staring at a subway map a little, was the West Fourth Street subway station, near Washington Square, and a good thirty blocks south, making it good that there was this subway system running south.
In accord with natural law the train going the right direction took its sweet time getting there, and we were worried about getting there awkwardly late. We also realized that ``West Fourth Street'' was a slightly under-specified meeting location, but just as bunny_hugger was getting her phone out to call her brother for directions she spotted him, just across the street, underneath the IFC theater.
Meeting went quite nicely, and we set off eastwards looking for a restaurant. Her brother had a particular vegetarian restaurant in mind, but on getting there the wait for a table was to be absurdly long. So we set out walking down the street and found ... the restaurant he had thought he was taking us to, a couple buildings down the way. There were similarly-themed, similarly-laid-out restaurants on the same block, but this one had a more reasonable wait, something like twenty minutes. (I may have this the wrong way around.) We left reservations and figured to walk over to Washington Square Park and see how the portions of it which weren't being renovated looked. The restaurant called just as we'd got to the park, so we turned around.
The restaurant, like the one we'd been in the day before, was pure vegetarian and made imitations of meat items out of textured gluten or whatnot. A particularly impressive performance was the creation of vegetarian drumsticks, with stalks of, I believe, sugar cane serving as an imitation bone that gave a good thing to hold simulated meat around and yet could also be eaten afterwards. Again, I'm really impressed with how much better vegetarian foods imitating meat are these days than they were two decades ago.
I'm also strikingly impressed with how easily we've met one another's family, siblings, and siblings' significant others. By the time her trip was done I'd met her immediate family including brother's quite significant other, she'd have met my whole immediate family except the one brother off in Massachusetts, and we can start looking into the semi-immediate or quasi-relations. So far we've all fit together with a wonderful harmony and nobody brushing anyone the wrong way. We haven't yet tested groups of relatives against groups of the other relatives but I think it all bodes well for future relations with low internecine conflict.
And as for dinner we had a grand time talking over such things as jobs and careers, and bunny_hugger's odd flight and flights we'd taken, and the nature of the graffiti on the bumper stickers in the men's room, and Banksy, and onward in that sort of spiral. That is, I can't say it was much more substantial than small talk but it was always steadily interesting in that way that, I believe, left us all wanting to know the others better.
We decided after dinner to go looking for gelato or a similar dessert, and bunny_hugger's brother thought he knew just the place, which he may well have except that we had trouble finding it. (This was in the part of Manhattan where instead of the famous rectangular grid of midtown you get the paths laid out by the Dutch who for some reason treated the geography of the island as in some way relevant to road patterns.) We had a couple of false starts and reversals of direction and would in time locate an Italian restaurant where we got seats in a very narrow corridor and were served the largest slice of cheesecake known to humanity. bunny_hugger and I are still there, weeks after the fact, trying to finish it. We also were left with a nagging feeling that one of the waiters looked familiar, but that observation didn't really amount to anything.
Afterwards, with the night considerably advancing, bunny_hugger and I wanted to get back to Rockefeller Center for the Christmas Tree, and her brother and his girlfriend wanted to get back home, so we parted at the subway station. We made it to the platform level before they did (they were going the opposite direction), although I believe their train got there first.
At Rockefeller Center I boldly lead us out of the station and into the wrong direction so we had to loop around in a couple of attempts to actually find the most attention-grabbing mob of people in the area. We also tried walking through the first level of 30 Rock rather than go around in the cold and wind and discovered the far end of the building was locked up, even though the end nearer the tree wasn't. (We learned that from stepping inside in order to change my camera battery and warm up for a few moments.) The tree was striking, and lovely, although it didn't seem to be doing the same sorts of light effects that we saw last year. In particular we didn't see extended periods of light-twinkling, although it's possible we just missed it as we did spend more time there last year.
This year, it was colder to start with, and we also realized that we were there much later --- late enough, in fact, that we worried whether we might miss the last bus home. That would have been ... actually, not so great an inconvenience because I had an alternate plan in mind (take the train to New Brunswick and plead with my brother and his wife to pick us up --- they're only a couple miles from the train station --- and put us up for the night; we assumed the train would run later than the bus) and if all else failed, well, we had credit cards and there must be somewhere in New York City one could exchange money for a room for a night. Still, we did decide not to linger quite as long as we might have and scurried back to the Port Authority where we reached a bus exactly in time to get a seat home.
We got back to the park-and-ride lot sometime after midnight, and came possibly silently together to the decision to go home and maybe snack on leftovers rather than stop somewhere to eat, since it wasn't actually that long after dinner and dessert.
We would have looser plans yet for Saturday.
Trivia: Peter Stuyvesant launched New Amsterdam's first municipal government in February 1653, in a second-floor room of the Stadt's Herbergh (City Tavern), soon renamed the Stadhuis (City Hall), on the East River with burgomasters and schepens appointed by Stuyvesant taking their oaths of office. Source: Gotham: A History Of New York City To 1898, Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.
Currently Reading: When Computers Were Human, David Alan Grier. Talking about the days when people did numerical computation by hand, with mechanical adjuncts, and boy it's fascinating stuff. I assume it's a different David Alan Grier from the one who appears on television, but there's not actually a biographic sketch to make sure of it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-07 05:56 am (UTC)It was the Lord and Taylor displays we looked at, just as we had last year, and they were also the same ones they had up last year, with the reindeer carousel I liked so much.
The first vegetarian restaurant that we came to was the wrong one (though we didn't know it) but had a wait of twenty minutes, so when we found the right one and it turned out to be an hour-plus wait, we decided to stick with the one that we'd put our names in at accidentally. Kevin declared it even better than the one he had meant to take us to.
The dessert we shared was actually a slice of white chocolate mousse. It was the best I've ever had, and I say that as someone who frequently orders white chocolate mousse when it appears on a menu.
And, the Rockefeller tree did do the twinkling thing again. We just had to wait a while before it happened, since it is quite infrequent, so at first we weren't sure it was going to do it. There was a bit of sometimes-rain, sometimes-snow sprinkling down on us while we were looking at it, but I didn't mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:54 am (UTC)You're right, Lord and Taylor. And we got there just in time for them to refuse to let us in even thought it was cold and we hoped to walk through and warm up that way.
Oh, something marvelous happened with regard to the initial vegetarian restaurants. I've got to tell you, and then perhaps share it here too.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-07 07:18 pm (UTC)Amazon carries those kits as well and I wondered the same thing. I could google it, I guess, but it's a 'boomer' thing, and such appeals to and tampering with my precious memories infuriate me (like the cheap knock-off Flexible Flyer junk from China).
However, being the model parent I am, I've introduced the kids to the now vilified and much maligned bubblegum cigarettes and cigars, and those fun little licorice pipes. ;o)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-07 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-07 08:03 pm (UTC)Particularly the Valomilk.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-07 10:12 pm (UTC)edited for redundancy!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-08 07:02 am (UTC)Sugar Daddy I haven't seen. But I loved the brief lifespan of Chocolate Covered Sugar Babies. Mmmm.
--Chi
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:35 am (UTC)I like Clark Bars, but it's easiest to find them in the non-chain convenience stores anymore. You know they were among the first 'combination' bars, and date back to the era of the First World War? It'd be a pity losing them.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 09:34 am (UTC)Personally I prefer Butterfingers, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-11 06:16 am (UTC)Oh, but that's promising. The NECCO people are good at keeping candy around, as their enduring existence suggests.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:39 am (UTC)My problem with the too-gooey stuff like Sugar Daddy or Mary Jane bars is they might be sweet but they get stuck on teeth. This makes them too complicated and difficult to eat. I prefer food that doesn't demand being the top priority.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-08 12:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-08 07:03 am (UTC)The new 'Pieces' line overall has been impressive. The York's Pieces are astonishingly good, and I'm eager to try the Special Dark.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:19 am (UTC)I haven't noticed these 'Pieces' things, although I've been resorting to the miniature size sugarless candies as little midday snacking items. At 20 to 40 calories per and the taste of a peanut butter cup, what's not to like?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 09:27 am (UTC)I suspect there'll be regular-sized bags of them for under-or-just-at-a-dollar purchase, soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-11 06:12 am (UTC)I'm going to have to spend more time in the candy aisles at the Shop-Rite, clearly. I tend to not think of looking at them for no really obvious reason.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-12 05:56 pm (UTC)They run about $3 a bag, and it's a *lot* in each bag.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-14 05:14 am (UTC)As an overall policy, yes, most of my weight loss really is a matter of eating less and eating better. But a certain amount of treating and candy and whatnot is an important part of staying good, too.
Office-sharing items would be more fun if my office weren't so far out of the flow of traffic. I can put stuff in the break room, and that satisfies the doing-something-sociable qualifications, I think, except I remember how poorly my attempts to offer tea to the community went. And yet chocolate has a logic of its own, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:18 am (UTC)That's much more detail than I'd remember. Best I can say is I had my first Mallo Cup, most likely, while visiting my father's parents sometime, since I think Mallo Cups come from grandparents first and foremost.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:32 am (UTC)I'd gone a long while without Mallo Cups --- heck, in Singapore I couldn't even find peanut butter cups --- but I'm back into them now, happily.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 05:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-11 06:10 am (UTC)It wasn't easy, although some did come in through the stores specializing in imports for foreign talent. (I even got a pack from the department secretary for some reason.) On the other hand, there were compensatory snacks. Have you ever had a vanilla bun? Or a breaded corn nugget? For that matter there's whatever kueh is ...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 05:01 am (UTC)It may be worth pointing out one of the early moments of our in-person, if remote, bonding was over the easy availability of Necco wafers around my apartment, and the absence of them around hers.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-07 08:01 pm (UTC)Though amusingly, the TV David Alan Grier has just put out a book as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-09 04:14 am (UTC)Ah, thank you. That sorts out people pretty well.