Rachel’s New York blog #3

So I did indeed meet Louisa at 5.00 yesterday. We had dinner at my favourite NY restaraunt – Khyber Pass – which serves wonderful Afghani food. I felt very good about my dinner because we shared an appetizer and one dish and didn’t even finish the dish, when usually I eat a whole main myself. After dinner we wandered around SoHO a bit and had some (lousy) coffee in a chic cafe on Broadway. On the way to the cafe bathrooms, windows looked out onto what looked like a great bookstore, so we headed there afterwards. It turned out to be this bookstore that Allan and I had once stumbled upon when we were living in NY and never found again, despite looking for it. It is a used bookstore with cafe/bar that is actually a fundraiser for an organisation that supports homeless AIDS suffers. It’s warehousey spacious, got lots of wood and a banistered balcony on either side of the store. I bought a very cute kid’s book for the lovely 5-year-old Madeleine and her brother Cadell.

I also happened to spot a gal who was in the same dorm as me at Bard, the college I went to for a year before going to Bristol. That was very cool, especially as she is still in touch with my old roommate, whom I found out has just gotten a Masters (?) in Special Education and is very soon to be married.

Louisa left me at the bookstore to go off to a class and I couldn’t get in touch with Solita so I wandered around the West Village until I happened upon Washington Square Park. There I discovered a neighbourhood association were soon to screen Don’t Look Back, a 1965 documentary about Bob Dylan. So, I hung around for that. The movie was okay, a little bit boring, and Dylan came across as a bit of an asshole. But what a beautiful night to be watching a movie under the stars.

I’ve been very good here about drinking lots of water, but it is causing me to pee very often. Which can be a problem in NY as public toilets do not abound. On the way to meet Louisa, I was forced to duck into the Strand (18 miles of used/cheap books) to make use of their toilet and did find my way to the fiction section to check on whether there were any copies of my favourite book (The Chess Garden). I get copies everytime I’m in NY. There were about 4 hardbacks and 4 softcovers. I bought one hardback for $6.50. Very restrained of me if I do say so myself. After the Strand it started to thunder, so I ducked into Veniero’s, the famous Italian cafe where my cousin works, and enjoyed iced coffee and a canolli, which the bakery is very famous for. Unfortunately my cousin was not working. I will have to try and hit Veniero’s after 7.00pm and hopefully I’ll find her there.

Today Solita and I made our way to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. This was a good day for reminding me why I don’t want to live in America. As we were eating water mozzarella, avocado and tomato sandwiches on Italian rolls in the only part of the park where you are allowed to sit on the grass, we watched a guard tell a group of exuberant school children that they weren’t allowed to play ball in the gardens (we were in a very big open field, bordered by trees). It was a tennis-sized ball. Just as Solita and I finished eating, the guard told us that we weren’t allowed to eat or picnic in the gardens; we could only eat cafe food at the cafe. I owe here one for waiting until we were finished for reprimanding us. As Solita and I walked around the Japanese and rose gardens we discussed how Americans can think they are so free when they can’t eat, sit, play or take their shoes off in the fucking botanic gardens. I will never go back there, at least not until those rules are lifted.

I thought it’d be better to wear my dressier flats today, you know, to rotate my walking shoes, but my feet hurt right from the get-go. I still got off the subway on the way back to Solita’s at the other side of Manhattan and walked a bit through Central and Morningside parks to get back home. My feet were killing me. I did take a half-hour sun and reading rest in Central Park, and then I stopped for pizza. Solita had told me about this place. Their pizza slice is absolutely enormous – wider and maybe twice as long as a dinner plate. I took pictures of both a full pie and a slice but do not know whether they will do the size of the pizza justice. The slice cost $2.75 and was a very good pizza.

Tonight Solita and I will eat a home-cooked meal of stuffed grilled Portobellos with Australian red wine (I didn’t know if the other cheap wines would be good, though I wanted to try a Brazilian or Chilean wine). Then we will be off to swing dance!

‘Til tomorrow…