Monday Evening to Wednesday Morning: Food, Movies, Food, Food, Music, Ugh

Don't let the ugh in the title mislead you: this was a very fun 30-ish hours.

First, on my flight home, the x-ray guy checked my backpack, then looked again, then talked to the inspector woman. She opened a particular small pouch on my bag, glanced around, and immediately spotted my swiss army knife. I had forgotten to take it out. I'm amazed at the accuracy and speed with which the Fort Lauderdale airport people found it, and vaguely disturbed by the fact that it was in my bag on my flight down and the La Guardia people didn't give me a second glance.

After arriving home I learned it was my apartmentmate's birthday. I could try to track her and the party down if I wanted. I also was planning to meet some people again at the Bryant Park festival. I decided to go to the festival. On the way, I tried the burek place again. Still closed. So instead I went to a well recommended cheap hot dog joint: Gray's Papayas. 75 cent hot dogs. And they were good! I had two, and some tasty payapa. That's about all they serve but, like in-n-out, it works.

At Bryant Park I couldn't find the people I intended to find, and the one phone number I had wasn't being answered. (I think it's likely the guy I was calling actually went to my apartmentmate's party instead. :) ) The movie was the The Thin Man, which I'd already seen and liked. I found a spot at the far end of the park to watch the short and previews and intended to leave after that.

The cartoon short was too long. There was a better ending point in the middle of the short that they should've used. (This is just me trying to be opinionated. :) )

Oh oh, I forgot to mention in my first bryant park movie post one thing that made this event so cool. During the first movie, the MC announced the schedule for the night would be previews, the short, the hbo dancers, then the movie. The HBO dancers, I thought, what was that?

After the short, the crowd started cheering in time with the animation of a computer zoom-in on bryant park with the HBO logo showing. As the logo got settled in the park, the music got louder and people got up and started dancing. Random people all throughout in the crowd. It lasted for about a minute. Just like that. Phat.

It happened again this time. :)

I almost left then but got hooked by the movie. It's good. This is what I wrote the first time I saw it: "Old noir-style comedy. Quite good, both funny and mystery-wise. Like most old movies, tight writing, complex plot. Very much in the style of Clue, except made 50 years earlier. Hero drinks like a fish."

Tuesday I wandered off for lunch and found that the burek place was open. It was authentic: the clientele and the eastern european language they were speaking confirmed it. A burek, it turns out, is a large triangular flakey bread thing filled with something, in my case meat with quite a bit of flavor (onions? garlic? mushrooms?). I think I have a thing for bread-things filled with meat.

I also remarked to them that it was really confusing that since the metal sheet they use to close the restaurant looks so tight and durable and since there wasn't an hours sign posted outside of it when they were closed, it's really hard to tell that the restaurant still exists. I think they might have understood..

During my lunch break I also bought a digital camera! More on that in a future post.

Dinnerish I wandered off again, this time to a pakistani counter-buffet style restaurant. (They call these restaurants steam-table restaurants in NYC.) It wasn't quite what I expected -much more Indianish than I had thought- but in retrospect I realized what I was thinking of was Afghani, not Pakistani. This restaurant too was authentic. Everyone there looked as if they were from that part of the indian-subcontinent. The only languages I heard spoken by customers to each other were from that region. During part of my meal, some people near me knelt on a carpet and prayed toward Makkah. The food that I had was okay, with a reasonable resemblance of Indian.

On the way home, I spotted a sale at a clothing store, went in, found some nice stuff, and bought a few things. (Mostly cool socks. :) )

I was feeling good, like my day was on a roll. So I decided not to let the day end, read a brief section of my jazz guidebook, and headed out down to 55 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. It was bar / jazzish club. Very cozy: I squeezed into a stool by the bar. Drank a vodka+lime and brooklyn lager. Respectable music. After the show, I hung around and listened. It seemed a number of the people in the bar were also artists, chatting about other gigs they'll play in nearby locations. I was also in the right corner to hear the bartender and some regulars chatting, and got involved in some conversation there about catching baseballs at games. And something else. I forget by now. But that was cool, chatting with random people at the bar at midnight. I should go to places like this more often. And most of these people were much older than me (and still up at midnight): more demonstrations that time is just different in NYC.

Sadly, Wednesday morning I woke up not feeling good. My stomach was just not happy. I blame food indigestion from the pakistani place combined with the fact that I had very little liquid that whole day -just some water around lunchtime- except for the two drinks at the bar. Of course, I always don't believe people when they blame their troubles on food issues after a night that involved drinking because it's almost always the drinking, so I probably shouldn't believe myself. We'll see if I actually believe myself by whether I go back to the restaurant.. But really it all comes down to drinking non-alcoholic fluids. I knew I should've and I remembered, but I was too lazy to get a glass of water. How stupid can I be?