Friday: Good Dinner, and some wandering with camera

Friday I picked out a place for dinner before I left work: a chowhound-recommended Turkish restaurant in lower eastern manhattan. On the way there, explored the few sites that were around. That part of lower manhattan has lots and lots of tall buildings. Also has a higher density than the rest of the city, quite intimidating. Saw some more fancy well-hidden churches, a cute row of English townhouses, and the outside of a supposedly really nice place called the Pierpont Morgan Library. It's a museum like place that made the top-ten list of sites to see in New York in my guidebook. Sadly, it's closed for renovation until 2006.

Ali Baba was an excellent well-hidden restaurant, with a nice though nondescript decor. I ordered babaganush to go with the focaccia-like bread that came when I sat down (good bread, better by itself than focaccia) and manti. The manti was described as "a Light Dough Stuffed with Seasoned Ground Lamb and Onions, Steamed to Perfection, served with Garlic Yogurt." I figured I was doing so well with meat stuffed in stuff I should continue the pattern. When it arrived, I was surprised. It was doughy balls maybe an inch across, each stuffed with a little lamb and seasoning, all in a big ceramic pan filled with a yogurty broth. I'm amazed how they got the little pieces of lamb in each tiny ball. But boy was it tasty!

After dinner I tried to explore the Gramercy district. It got too dark for me to get very far. But I did take a number of pictures during this trip, especially of the empire state building (which looked really stunning at night). My empire state building pictures didn't come out very well (too much camera shake), not as nice as this picture I found on the web. I may post all my pictures later when I find a good web interface or (more likely) program my own web interface.

Until then, you're stuck with the few pictures I bothered to shrink and upload:
* a decent picture of the met life building
* a very interesting sign (at this museum)
* a statue that I walked two feet past before realizing that it wasn't a real person. (Hey, it was dark.)
* a sign at a church - maybe the phrasing could've been better considering the news in the last few years...

Update: I uploaded the rest of the pictures from this day's sights.