Thursday: Theater District, Pakistani, and Burgers

These pictures go with this post.

Ah, Thursday. Thursday was devoted to the theater district. The morning involved a bit of hiking along the west side of it. Along the way, I found a perfect example of what I mean by hidden churches. Then came across a massive convention center (see pictures). Supposedly they can fit the entire statue of liberty inside.

There was also a big ship that served as the base of the sea-air-space museum (see pictures). It looked cool -spot the stealth?- but the line was long so I decided I'd go back later.

While wandering through Times Square, I decided to snap some pictures that capture the feel of it, all the animated billboards, the hoards of people, and more. In retrospect, I realized I missed the most obvious item in Times Square: the electronic ticker tape. I finally have evidence for the garish McDonalds. Despite all the over-the-top-ness of most things in Times Square, the McDonalds is too much: worse than even the most egregious theatres.

Lunch was almost an Ethiopian restaurant. (Couldn't remember if I heard good things about it.) Then it was almost Sandwich Planet. (A sandwich place with a Zagat rating of 25! Barely anything in my price range ever has that rating. Sadly, it only has five tables -besides take-out- and they were full.) Then it was almost this Moroccan place I'd heard about. Sadly, it was closed (without any sign why). Finally, I ended up at the Pakistani place I'd been to before. Again, it was fairly good. Eggplants & potatoes, also chicken curry. I drank a reasonable amount of water this time and no ill effects. My previous issue after eating there must've been something hangover-like. (Sorry, forgot to take a picture of the restaurant.)

After work and finishing taking more pictures in Times Square, I headed north and saw some more famous buildings. Like Carnegie Hall. And this building with a tower that changed color and lighting according to the weather forecast.

Then for dinner -this time I'd planned- I grabbed a train down to the Gramercy district. I was heading toward a pub named Molly's (description). At the intersection it was supposed to be nearby, I spotted five other pubs before spotting this one! It was a typical pub in all ways, inside and outside. Sitting in the back, I had a Guiness and a burger and fries. And it was great! I can certainly believe the chowhounders when they said the place had one of the best burgers in the city. Sadly, my camera batteries were definitely and definitively dead by this point so I couldn't take a picture of the outside of the pub. And the light at night was perfect for it! :( Oh well. But there is picture of it on one of the pages linked to above. (By the way, the place even had sawdust on the floor. That makes it even cooler.)

I Need Somewhere to Live!!

Wonderful people -

I need somewhere to live when I return to the bay area! I presume I'll beg some of you to put me up temporarily when I arrive while looking for a new place. But really I'd want a/some cool roommates. If you know anyone cool with a space in his or her place or looking for a new place, tell me! Berkeley preferred, though SF near Bart or AC transit F line also acceptable.

I'm going to postpone posting some blog posts in order to leave this post at the top of the page for a while.

Uneventful Wednesday, but One Good Photo; Apartment-Mates

Wednesday morning I had some Nova Scotia salmon on a bagel. Not as salty as the belly lox I had before, but sadly not as tasty either.

One the way home from work, I grabbed a good picture of the Met Life building at night looking festive. (And I'm quite proud I managed to take it without a tripod.)

I think it's a good time to mention my apartment-mates are cool. My latest apartment-mate moved in mid-June. I wrote the beginning of blog post at that time:

Although she moved in on Saturday, the first time I met my new apartment-mate was last (Monday) night. It's, Lexi, someone I'm previously acquainted with from Mountain View. From what I previously know, I think we'll get along well. :) And she'll be staying longer than I will so no more new apartment-mates. (The two I previously had visited new york for very short periods.) Her husband is going to come out here and move in with her in a week.

It seems my prediction was true. She's cool, and her husband is cool. Her husband studies/teaches film and that makes him an interesting conversationalist. They've also been going through the first season of Babylon 5. I've been occasionally watching with them. Oh, and for reference the reason I started writing that paragraph is because I discovered they brought their own set cards out here (as I did), and we played a few hands. They're good, feels like slightly better than I am. Fun stuff. See, cool apartment-mates.

Wednesday: Eastern Chelsea, and Later Curry Hill

(This refers to Wednesday, July 7th; written on Thursday, July 8th.)

Wednesday morning, a little worried that my time to explore New York was running out, I decided to wander eastern Chelsea / the garment district on the way to work. Much of it I'd already seen, like the enormous post office that I walk by all the time (panorama picture taken on an earlier evening). On the way out of my apartment, I grabbed some rugalach and a small hamantashen to nosh along the trip. (If you don't know what these are, you don't hang out with jews enough.) Mostly this wandering in Chelsea taught me how apt the garment district and fashion avenue references were. It's not that clothes were hipper or even more abundant in stores here, it's that the street vendors sold belts, and side streets were filled with store after store selling women's handbags. Lots of accessories. And then, of course, there was Macy's -so big it had fast food vendors in different parts of different levels of its store- and some giant shopping centers.

See, this whole part of the district is anchored by the empire state building. The line of tourists went around the corner of the block. I snickered at them and passed it by. Of course I'll go back. :) Maybe 11pm when all the tourists are nicely tucked in their hotel rooms or hotel bars.

What else is worth mentioning? Again there were some nice churches; Saint John the Baptist had a nice stained glass window. (It had lots of others further inside but I didn't feel comfortable taking pictures of those.) Here's another church; I think it is a good example of what I mean by hidden/camouflaged churches. There is a monument to General Worth here (for which Fort Worth is named); apparently he is buried under a street. (What an honor!) Also, there was a nice building that looked like a castle. And, to mention for name value, the Fashion Institute of Technology is in this district. Penn Station and Madison Square Garden are too, though they're what you'd expect and thereby not worth mentioning. Oops. :)

I left work at a reasonable time today to go toss a disc with some googlers (mostly interns) in Central Park. Very nice, very green. Got a nice breeze so it was cooler than the rest of the city. From where we were, we had a tremendous view of the Manhattan skyline. Sadly my camera batteries died when trying to take this panorama. But I'll be back and take it some other time.

After frisbee and a subway right down to the east village, I arrived at curry hill. Walking up and down the street, I could really tell what Anthony Bourdain meant in Kitchen Confidential when he refers to the stench of death on a restaurant. It really is a depressing feeling of despair, of desperation, a feeling that the restaurant will close soon. The feeling is accentuated by the fact that some restaurants have sad-looking Indian men in suits (clearly the managers) looking for foot traffic and sometimes urging people to go in.

I came with some recommendations and ended up at a fairly lively feeling place called the Brick Lane. I could tell it was a good restaurant, despite making bad choices in what I ordered. I had something called goam (a whitish creamy sauce) with lamb and a naan-like bread stuffed with onions (kulcha?). I frequently make the mistake of ordering kulcha at indian restaurants and, while good, it's always so potent to dominate the flavors in a meal. In this case, that wasn't so bad because I didn't like the tanginess of the goam. But I know the restaurant is good because of the flavors in the rice by itself and the tenderness of the lamb.

Tuesday: More Curry Hill, and Amazing Jazz

Tuesday I grabbed a decent sandwich for lunch. But dinner was the interesting meal. I was in the mood for Indian, so back to Curry Hill I went, this time to a place called Banjara. (Sorry for a poor quality photo. I really wanted to take the photo from a particular place, but that place was the middle of the street...) It was a pretty nice restaurant, quite crowded: definitely not one of those desperate curry hill restaurants. I had a marinated lamb dish that was quite tasty. (It really didn't have a typical indian food type taste but actually reminded me of my mom's marinated lamb, which I really like.) Some good piping hot (pea) samosas too.

I still wanted to go something after dinner. So I checked my list of jazz clubs I wanted to visit and found one with a set that started late. I ended up at the Zinc Bar for the 11pm set. It was small and cozy, candles and brick walls. Although packed, I got lucky and found a seat at the bar. The band was the Alex Blake quartet. One normally doesn't find a band named after the bassist but this time the naming was appropriate. He was freaken` amazing; the bass just wailed. He played it as fast and energetic and expressive as many play electric (bass) guitars. And he added some beating on the side of the bass and some occasional scat vocals. During an intermission he actually played an electric bass guitar and one could see the similarity. But it was amazing! I've never seen a bass played like that... (And the rest of the musicians were really good too. :) Here's a review of them.)

The day was definitely a good use of my subway card: to google, google to curry hill, curry hill to home, home to soho, soho to home.

Monday: Food, Gramercy/Flatiron, Shrek 2, Food

(This refers to Monday, July 5th; written on Thursday, July 8th.)

Monday was to be devoted to exploring the Gramercy/Flatiron district. I started the day by examining my list of recommended restaurants in the area. The only restaurants were some sushi places, some Indian (which I intended to eat on Tuesday), and Ali Baba (the turkish place I ate at on Friday). Following Kitchen Confidential, I'm avoiding seafood in Mondays. So back to Ali Baba it was. (Yes, I took that picture.)

A quick cross-town bus later -it was too hot to hike that far- and I was there. And it was good. This time I had pide which, at a very rough level, is Turkish pizza. But no sauce and no cheese. Pieces looked kind of like this; the whole item somewhat like this. (I really should've swallowed my pride and taken a picture of my food before I ate it! That would have saved me much trouble finding pictures on the web.) The main differences between my pide and the ones in these pictures were that my pide was longer: it was cut in half along the shorter axis and each half was the length of my plate and my pide had tiny pieces of lamb and grilled vegetables inside. It was really good. The bread itself kind of reminded me of pizza bread but was actually more tasty. You'll notice that the food doesn't go near the edge, i.e. it doesn't really appear until the fold in the bread. So, there is a good inch and a half all the way around the pide that was just bread. In american pizzas I generally eat the crust but don't appreciate it much. In this I ate it all and liked it a lot, just as much as the part of the bread with items on it.

On the way to lunch, I noticed the third avenue had lots of good looking restaurants. Maybe I'll be back. Sadly, from my wandering on Friday evening I noticed this district isn't very happening/popular at night.

The Gramercy District is nice. The commercial part has a number of buildings with impressive towers, and the residential component has some very beautiful buildings. I took this nice shot of the empire statue building with a church in the foreground. It was taken close to Madison Square Park, which had not one but two weird sculptures. (If you read my post from Sunday, you'll see I'm in a weird sculpture period.) While examining the second trying to figure out what and why it was (and probably looking confused), a helpful passerby remarked, "The sculptor is the husband of the arts commissioner in the city." That explains a bit.

The Gridiron building is also in the district (obviously, given the alternate name of the district!). I wonder what kind of people go out of their way to get a room in the point.

There is an impressive courthouse nearby. My panorama looks odd because I rotated the camera too much, but you can tell from this picture of the top of the courthouse that it really is ornate.

Gramercy Park looks nice but is locked for everyone that doesn't live within a block.

Sometime during this wandering it started pouring. Thunderstorm and all. Luckily I was in a gallery at the time and by the time I noticed and then spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do next given the weather, it stopped. Only negative of it stopping was by 15 minutes later, it was again as roasting as it was beforehand.

Grabbed some apple cider at the farmer's market in Union Square. You know the apple cider is good when the place selling it sells a few different variations that depend on which apples they made it from...

Then I decided to do what I hear New Yorkers do when it is too hot out: go to an air-conditioned movie. Grabbing the first free paper I found -which happened to be The Onion! :)- I browsed the listings and decided to see Shrek 2 in a nearby theater. It was great. A well done fun enjoyable entertaining flick; I'd recommend it.

Dinner involved hunting around the east village. So many tempting indian restaurants, but I'm planning to go to curry hill later this week, so I found a (non-indian) place: Mancora, a Peruvian restaurant. During hunting, though, I was tempted again by sushi places. That is, until I saw one place that advertised 50% off all sashimi, and then I remembered Kitchen Confidential and why I was avoiding seafood. And tempted by an Israeli, Polish, and a number of Turkish restaurants, but decided I wasn't in the mood for any of those.

It turns out Mancora served mostly seafood! (Maybe I should go back on a non-Monday..) I ended up ordering a chicken dish that involved a number of stripes of chicken molded into three inch diameter cylinders and stuffed with mushrooms, spinach, and cheese. Good, but fairly dry. (I think that might be a consequence of how you have to cook it so the chicken ends up done but without overcooking the vegetables inside.) It came with a tasty pile of spinach mashed potatoes; I also ordered a pretty good Peruvian Pilsner-like beer Cusquena.

Update: today's pictures and more are online.

I'm Back in NY!

As some of you know, I was back in the bay area Thursday through Monday for a Game. It was fun. That's all I'll say about that under my policy of what I can and can't talk about in this blog. If I missed seeing you while I was in town, I'm sorry; I was really quite busy.

I actually have two blog posts (with pictures) on my laptop that I wrote (on the plane on Thursday) about the beginning of last week that I haven't had a chance to upload yet. I'll do that tonight.

The plane flights -nice and direct- were fine, though a little boring. On the way out I watched a hokey but cute movie that could best be described as "cowboy invited to middle east horse race." On the way back I'd forgotten to bring a book, so I was bored. And fidgety and somewhat uncomfortable, partially because the excessively large women on my right overflowed her seat. Glucose issue? Anyway, the trip back wasn't all bad. I watched Jersey Girl and was pleasantly surprised; I didn't think Kevin Smith would be able to make a good meaningful non-comedy. And then I watched a lot of the only two other stations that were worthwhile and so saw a documentary about lions hunting elephants, a documentary about the social life (read mating) of the long-nosed monkeys of Borneo, a documentary about the Sydney-Hobart yacht race, and a documentary about the evidence for and against a large monster in a lake in the midwest.

(Meta comment: I'm glad my blog does seem to reflect me.)

Ran into a Google friend of mine on the way back that was also coming back from the Game, and so gossiped a lot, and split a cab into Manhattan. Very convenient. Especially since it was really pouring.

Sunday (part 1): Ultimate, Columbia, and more

Sunday was another busy day. First ultimate, at a field close to this spot on the Hudson river. Well not really ultimate exactly. At first we only had five people so we played a variation I hadn't seen before. It's played on a small field, with two pairs of cones about 3 feet apart from each other on each end of the field. To score, knock over a cone with a disc. Any cone. (Obvious variations involve giving sides and knocking over your opponents' cone(s).) Only additional rule is that if you get the disc on one half of the field due to a turnover, you can't knock over the nearby cones immediately. The disc has to cross the center line of the field before you can go back to knock over either of those cones. Of course, if you're already on the other half of the field, you may want to continue in that direction and knock over one of their cones. If you touch the cone (you, not the frisbee), your opponents get a point. After playing this for a while someone else came and we played real small field ultimate. Pretty fun.

On the way to ultimate, I spotted an odd sight called safety city. Apparently used for helping teach traffic laws and policy.

Then I ventured off to explore the somewhat nearby district of Morningside Heights.

* It contains Grant's Tomb (well, his wife's tomb too). I can't believe I had forgotten he was president (in addition to being a famous general)! Impressive and like the memorials in DC (but certainly not surpassing them).

* There was also an international house nearby with an odd sign. I wonder if the letter substitution was conscious..

* This district, like all others, has a number of well-hidden and not-so-well-hidden churches. Riverside Church is particularly impressive; another nice church was just around the corner.

* The center of this neighborhood is Columbia University. It's very well-fortified: buildings lay around all the edges; where there is not a building, there is a fence or a gate. There are only about four entrances into the university, each watched by a Columbia police officer. Entering makes one feel very safe and cozy. The campus is nice. Nice assortment of architecture. Quite dense, but with some wide-open spaces like their quad. I also found a very large random statue. If you think you can tell what (or why) this is, do so!

* A quick walk along Morningside Park reminds one why all the security. The number of homeless people sleeping on benches reminded me that perhaps this isn't the best neighborhood. Along this side of Morningside Heights was a strange fountain. Was it meant to be a fountain? If so, where was the base of the fountain? These questions may never be answered..

* The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (side view; top view - not taken by me) was fairly majestic looking. It's been in the process of being built for more than a century. They're about two-thirds done now but it looks pretty finished. Raise money, build more, raise money, repair, raise money, build more, ... When finished, it'll be the largest cathedral in the world. Sadly, I couldn't take pictures inside because it was so tremendously large my flash wouldn't do anything (and I didn't have a tripod). Let's just say the place is everything you'd imagine a cathedral is and should be. The outside looks pretty impressive too.

* The Cathedral is on a very large beautiful grassy plot of land. Sadly, most of it was fenced off. One part that wasn't fenced had yet another weird statue. Also, I noticed something wrong with one of the fences -- do you notice it too?

These pictures and more are available.

By this point, the day was hot and humid and I was thirsty. A quick subway and smoothie later, I was back in my air conditioned apartment. Then after a quick shower, a brief attempt at hair spiking (didn't look that great - maybe I'll try again later) (also, camera was dead by this point so no picture for you!), a mediocre burrito, I headed out to an evening of Un-American Films. Yes, it was July 4th.

The group that runs this is called Rooftop Films. They normally show films on a rooftop. (Duh!) But this time the showing was on a pier on the west side of Manhattan (near Tribeca). I had imagined the people there would be hip sf-mission-district-like people but really they looked fairly regular. Before the movie, we watched the fireworks off in the distance by the south tip of the island. Fireworks generally don't excite me that much, but they did some cute things this time like a heart and a smiley face.

Narrator's remark: at this point in writing I realized I have enough to say about the films to merit another post. Besides, this post is long enough already and I wanted to post it rather than wait a few days to finish it. So, part 2 about the movies will be forthcoming.