New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 2 (or, Indian food and puzzles: a relaxing weekend day)

On my first full day in New Jersey, I started my vacation on the right foot and didn't do much. I thought a bit about my plans for the upcoming week and e-mailed a few people to coordinate schedules, but mostly just hang out at my friends' place.

The only real event of note was our lunch-time journey to Moghul Indian in Edison, NJ. A quite good Indian buffet, heads above most other such buffets I've had.

Incidentally, en route to Moghul I got the feel of Metuchen. (It had a middle/middle-upper class feel with mostly single-family brick houses.) We passed one house with what I thought was an interesting piece of art on the lawn: what appeared to be black columns at odd (though mostly vertical) angles with trash cans as heads. When returning, someone suggested, rightly so, that it was likely trees wrapped with plastic bags and covered for the winter. But I still like thinking about it as artwork.

Anyway, Moghul Indian's buffer was surprising because in addition to the standard fare they had some chinese stuff (singapore noodles and a chinese stir-fry), imperial rolls (technically vietnamese but theirs looked more like egg rolls), and even continental (like potato skins or tomatoes stuffed with mashed potatoes, and fresh fruit). I thought perhaps this is what an Indian restaurant has to do to attract enough customers in an as unadventurous places as this area of New Jersey. (Clearly my stereotype of New Jersey is coming into play here.) But I realized later this rationale doesn't hold water when Bryson and Catherine drove me down Oak Tree Road in Edison, a quaint downtown with countless Indian places and clearly a strong community. (Thus, Moghul shouldn't need to attract white customers with this type of non-Indian fare; I suppose some Indian customers must appreciate the continental cuisine. Although frankly I'm not sure why they would -- I tried one tomato-wrapped item and it was bad.)

Digressions aside, Moghul was quite tasty. They had good staples like butter chicken, chicken curry, and saag paneer to more unusual dishes like an okra dish and something I've never seen that included crispy flakes (almost like rice crispies) and vegetables and spices that was made on the spot by a server. And every time I got naan at the buffet line, it tasted as if I'd just ordered it. Amazing! I was also happy I tried the dessert they had, a custardy cinnamon rice pudding dish.

The afternoon consisted simply of Bryson and I doing puzzles and such with Catherine's intermittent help. (She mostly had something work related to do.) We mostly did a set of hard word-play puzzles called "Scare Tactics" the New York Times published one recent Halloween. (Sadly, I can't link to it; the New York Times themselves has eliminated the page from its database. I do have a saved copy. If you want it, mail me.)

Dinner was, like the previous night, cooked at home. I helped contribute to dinner (by trimming snap peas) about as much as the night before. Bryson and Catherine used their wok magic to make a tasty Chinese spicy shrimp stir-fry with snap peas. (And I love snap peas.)

Later in the evening, -I'm not sure what incited this- Catherine decided she was in the mood for corn bread. And so she made some. Spur of moment corn bread, from a recipe that she's never tried before. I become instantly even more impressed with the food tendencies of Bryson and Catherine -- choosing good restaurants, cooking well, and doing neat spontaneous food ideas. (I don't do much spontaneous cooking.) And, yes, the corn bread muffins turned out well.

(Incidentally, a week after I returned, inspired by their memory I cooked my own corn bread. It turned out decently, though I don't think as well -- it had less structural integrity and was a little drier. But then my recipe in fact was simple and didn't use buttermilk or sour cream or any diary product.)

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 1 (or, flying, food, and settlers)

From Saturday March 18th 2006 to the 25th (also a Saturday), I took a vacation and visited some friends in New Jersey and New York. It was a great vacation! I got to hang out with people I hadn't seen in ages; I got to explore some places I never previously visited; I got to see some shows that I've been meaning to see for a while; I ate some food I'd never previously tried. And I also achieved my goal of spending some time relaxing and doing nothing, making it a true vacation. This and the following blog posts will document what I did -- effectively a series of diary entries reconstructed from my memories of the week and the little piles of notes and ticket stubs I have.

Since this was to be a vacation, I decided to pay a little extra and get a direct flight leaving the bay area at a reasonable time and arriving at the most convenient airport (Newark) to the friends I'd be staying with for most of the trip. My BART trip and flight were fairly uneventful. (Although I had a middle seat on a packed flight, it didn't bother me. I spent most of the flight watching television shows and reading news articles I'd downloaded to my computer.)

Flying on United and feeling hungry, I spent the extra five dollars to spring for their turkey and cheddar wrap. It was a sad item, with more cheese than turkey -I ended up removing most of it- and fairly sad processed turkey. Still edible enough. And the perfect size, it was small enough to leave me hungry for dinner when I landed, and this turned out to be quite a good thing.

Indeed, after Bryson kindly picked me up from the Newark airport, we arrived at his apartment to find his fiance, Catherine cooking -another friend of mine, of course- and dinner almost ready. It was great; I was hungry from the flight and steak fajitas with red peppers, onion, fresh cheese (I offered to help whatever was left to do, so I got to grate the cheese :> ), and fresh avocado. Fajitas: such a simple but good food.

Not surprisingly, since moving east Bryson and Catherine have missed being in close proximity to Settlers of Catan players. And I don't play it enough anyway to satisfy my craving. As I write this now, it seems like fajitas: Settlers is simple strategy game, yet interesting and social and good every time. Thus, we played. I lost both games -not that surprising- but I came close once (and had fun). And hanging out was nice. I was glad that I had started to fulfill the promise I'd made last fall when they moved east that I'd visit them.

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 6 (or, Moma, Turkish, and night-time wandering)

It's another day, another bagel, another type of cream cheese, and another train ride to Manhattan. It was Thursday and the weather was certainly more pleasant than the frigid Monday I spent in Princeton, a fact I appreciated in the evening when I was up and out late.

The daytime was devoted to (finally) visiting the Museum of Modern Art. I have many pictures from my Moma wandering that accompany this narrative. Some pieces mentioned in the narrative have no pictures, and some pictures aren't discussed in this blog entry. (There are also a few pictures there from the rest of the day's activities.)

Moma had everything I could imagine. Some things I thought were cool enough to write down:
* Furniture, design, and the like.
* Architecture, including a neat exhibit of lots of ghetty houses. Also had a large display with many photographs of one particular house from countless angles. I didn't really understand the point of it.
* Jackson Pollock.
* Roy Lichtenstein.
* Mondrian (they had lots!).
* Calder.
* Recent art that I don't normally consider "modern" like van Gogh and Picasso and Monet. I was struck by how large Monet's Water Lilies painting is (each panel is 6' by 13').
* Matisse.
* Miro.
* Derain.
* Seurat.
* Cubism in general.
* Malevich's Women with Water Pails.
* Leger's Propellers.
* Carlo Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli.
* Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player.
* Kadinsky.
* A special exhibit of photographs from around the world. Three in this exhibit really stood out for me: one by Stuart Klipper of a swell, and two of women with poems in farsi written on their face or hands. (Too bad no pictures of photographs were allowed.)
* A special exhibit on Munch with dozens of paintings made over his lifetime. The exhibit and his painting The Kiss in particular made me realize he is a more diverse artist than I thought.
* A special exhibit on architecture (mostly public buildings) in Spain with many miniature 3-d models. Many buildings were very impressive. (Too bad no pictures were allowed.)
* Two cafes and a fine-dining restaurant overlooking the sculpture garden. I'm not surprised Moma has a high-end restaurant; it helps woo wealthy donators.

An odd observation: every attendant I saw in Moma was male. How unusual... I wonder why that is.

After exploring Moma until closing, I met up with Seth for evening activities. As we walked south, we caught up, talked about future plans (such as what are we going to do with our lives), and debated where to eat. All similarly important. ;)

Eventually we decided on and found ourselves at the Turkish Kitchen. The decor, very red and with dim lighting (so dim we remarked we should've brought flashlights to help us read the menus), made me think it was a place intended for dates.

While Seth and I perused the menu, debated what to order, and examined what people around us ordered, one person at the neighboring table interjected and offered us advice and a free taste of his stuffed grape leaves. (They were pretty good, and we ended up ordering something similar.) This was something that happens rarely or never on the west coast, and brought us to discussing how New Yorkers are more well practiced interacting with new people on short notice, as there are so many people the average New Yorker runs into on a daily basis.

We were generally pleased with everything we ordered at the Turkish Kitchen. One appetizer, "icli kofte," ground lamb and spices in bulghur patties (a la bulghur falafel), was quite good but a bit oily and needed yogurt. (Meat stuffed in nearly anything is good, and this was no different.) Our other appetizer was grilled eggplant with (garlic) yogurt. The dish seemed authentic but it had too much yogurt (which we put to good use with the first appetizer).

As for entreess, the (boneless! how cool is that) cornish hen stuffed with rice (with pine nuts, dill, etc.) was very good. Each -the hen and the rice- was good by itself (appropriately tasty and moist) and worked well together. This came with a zucchini pancake much like a potato pancake that was also quite good. Our other entree was "etli lahana dolmasi," cabbage stuffed with ground beef and rice and herbs and served with yogurt. In essence, a pretty good dish like dolmas except made with cabbage instead of grape leaves.

After dinner and a quick stop at Seth's apartment to deposit my stuff, we headed to Brooklyn to a neighborhood Seth wanted to show me called Williamsburg. It's a recently revitalizing district just across the east river from Manhattan. The part we explored first was an industrial area with many brick warehouses and the like, the insides of which have been turned into hip bars and restaurants. The contrast between the exterior and the insides is a bit shocking at first. Although the area is still slightly sketchy off the main streets, a visible police presence on many corners made us feel comfortable. We looked around so I could get the flavor; we didn't go into any of the many bars or clubs. From what I could tell, I liked the crowd: on this Thursday evening the crowds were small but good -- what looked like interesting people, although of the type that are too hip for me.

One run-down end of the neighborhood had a tremendous view over the East River to Manhattan. Seth told me stories about the debates about building housing in the area and the restriction on builders regarding affordability and low-income housing. Throughout the evening while talking about our futures and where we (especially he) planned to live, we talked much about real estate prices and cost of living and especially how local ordinances and building restrictions are a significant cause of high housing prices. This evocative example and the negotiations between New York City and the builders further intensified this discussion. Where is the trade-off between revitalization and gentrification?

Before heading back to Manhattan, we stopped by a local good frozen yogurt chain called Tasti D-Lite. We chatted with the guy behind the counter, who apparently lived in Manhattan and commuted to Brooklyn to work. How odd. This conversation is another data point proving New Yorkers are friendly.

We exited the subway in the meat packing district, an area I never really explored while I lived in the city yet not far from where I lived. The meat packing district is an area with many clubs and bars, some without any visible signage. We wandered around a bit, observing many hip (and expensive) restaurants and some clubs and bars with lines of snazzily dressed people waiting for the bouncer's approval to enter. It reminds me of elementary school sports -- oooh, pick me, pick me! At one hotel with a rooftop bar, Seth approached two pretty German tourists and talked them into escorting us past the bouncer to get us in the building. Pretty slick, especially since neither of us were dressed well enough.

After snapping a few photos from the roof, we left the bar since it was packed and we were out of place wearing walking-around in seedy neighborhood clothes (which we wore for Williamsburg). Then we proceeded to spend two hours (or so) on a meandering walk through the village to cross Manhattan.

Near the end of the walk, we were in the East Village and two girls yelled out of a car and asked where to get good sushi. Some other guys on the street answered, but this is another example that New Yorkers are just more comfortable interacting and dealing with new people than many others. I can't imagine that happening at such a late hour in San Francisco. As another contrast with nearly everywhere in the world, Seth remarked the appropriate question for New York City was not "is there a sushi place open this late" but rather "which sushi place open this late is the best"?

Around 2:30am we had returned to the vicinity of Seth's place near Union Square and he wanted to show me his favorite 24-hour diner, Veselka. Veselka is a Polish restaurant (that serves a large quantity of traditional diner fare too). We stuck with small items from the Polish side of the menu. The blintzes we ordered, filled with farmer's cheese, were terrific, light and tasty! The peirogies, in contrast, were sad. We ordered them fried (expecting pan-fried), but the outside texture (and uniformity of it) made us think they were deep fried?! And they were luke-warm too. The place was fairly crowded and service was slow to the point of being bad (e.g., we had trouble getting the check).

After such a long day, we then called it a night.

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 3 (Metuchen and Princeton)

I took a smattering of pictures during this day; these pictures serve as accompaniment and supplement to this entry.

On Monday I explored Princeton. On Sunday I'd realized I knew a number of people attending graduate school at Princeton (besides the friend I was staying with) and coordinated meeting for lunch with one of them.

Since Bryson went to lab early and Catherine had work, when I woke up I was on my own. After learning about train schedules, I figured I'd explore downtown Metuchen for a while, catch the train to Princeton, explore it a bit, eat lunch with Scott and Bryson, and then likely explore Princeton more.

Freshly showered, I dressed as warmly as I could and headed out. Downtown Metuchen is cute. There are occasional plaques denoting historic buildings and describing historical incidents; this give the town a lot of character and credit in my book. It's clear Metuchen is also mostly a commuter town -- many store open bright and early at 6am so people can stop by before they catch a train. It was quite empty when I explored around nine and ten am. Besides the nice traditional main street (literally named main street) with its assortment of small stores of virtually every type, the only thing I recall about the street is the surprising number of beauty salons / hair cutting places. I asked Bryson about this in the evening and he suggested that there were many stay-at-home mothers in the area and they frequented such establishments.

During the course of my wandering, I grabbed breakfast at a good place: Bagels-4-U. I spent a while mesmerized by their assortment of cream cheeses that they appeared to make themselves and paralyzed by the decision of which bagel with which cream cheese, that I, not having noticed all the bagel bins, when the counter-woman asked me for the third time what I wanted -ah, "New York" impatience-, panicked and said pumpernickel. And even that bagel was good. (Why oh why can't I get good bagels on the west coast?)

On the train to Princeton, I stared out the window and contemplated the land as we passed. It's nice seeing such a high density of trees -quite different from the CalTrain or BART-, although it did surprise me that there was so much undeveloped land in New Jersey (especially so close to a commuter rail line). And some people claim real estate prices will inevitably rise because land is in short supply...

In Princeton first I wandered along the perimeter of the campus, examining downtown Princeton and the university. I found a neat park downtown; view the pictures. The university itself was gothic, filled with elaborate dark gray brick buildings (with gargoyles) giving the impression of timelessness. (They did have a few newer buildings in a different style, but those really felt out of place.) The campus appearance seemed appropriate for the weather, which stayed around freezing the whole day. Together, the university and the town felt like (old) money, similar to what Stanford would feel like if Palo Alto and the campus were actually adjacent. (But Stanford would feel like new money.)

In the middle of my wandering, I stopped to meet Scott and Bryson for lunch. We decided on an innocuous choice: Panera Bread. Panera Bread is my favorite sandwich chain -- other chains do individual items better but Panera Bread is fairly consistently good. It always leaves me filled, probably from the whole grain baguette I get on the side at every meal there. (Conversely, Bryson complained it always leaves him hungry. But he doesn't order the baguette.)

It was good to see that Scott seems to be doing well and is happily excited by his research. He's living the devoted graduate student life, working hard and wearing a jacket in honor of meetings with his professor. (I guess economists are more formal than computer scientists?)

After lunch I looked around campus more. As you'll notice from my pictures, I found a number of weird statues around campus. Later I found an list of all these sculptures.

I also took an incredibly poor campus tour. The guide clearly had her lines memorized and we didn't go anywhere interesting. By interesting, I mean places I hadn't already stumbled upon during my wanderings. And it felt artificial: for instance, many times when the tour guide was talking about a particular department or activity, she cited a roommate that participated in it. I swear I counted at least half a dozen roommates.

I took the online tour afterward and found it faster and more interesting. But I did learn that some dorm rooms have 11 people so I suppose her claims can be true (though I doubt it). Also, on the online tour I found a picture of an unusual gargoyle I wish I saw in person!

All the same, on the campus tour, I did learn:
* Princeton was the capitol of the United States for a while; a fact I verified online.
* Princeton originally was called the "College of New Jersey" and changed its name a few times, becoming Princeton University in 1896.
* A cute superstition involving the main gate to the campus. I wonder how many students listen to it?
* Princeton's mascot is the tiger but was originally the lion. Like me, when I don't think too deeply, I can mix them up. And indeed students and alumni did mix them up over time, donating tiger statues when the lion was still the mascot and vice versa. Eventually, so the story goes, the tiger became the official mascot because the colors -orange and black- look better than whatever they were doing before with lions and manes.

Because of my prior exploration, by the end of the tour I'd been outside for a number of hours and was quite frigid, so I called Bryson and we headed back to Metuchen. On the way Bryson showed me a neat feature of the train seats -- all the rows are on sliders and can reverse to make them face the same direction or face the adjacent seats. California trains should be built like this! It's convenient: face the way you want and/or restructure the train to better accommodate large groups!

Upon returning to Metuchen we hung around the apartment for a while (partially to warm up a bit). When Catherine told us she wouldn't be back for dinner, we debated where to eat for a while, generated a short list of ideas, and headed out to downtown Metuchen. It being a Monday, our first choice was closed, so we took the opportunity to further wander around Metuchen and see what else was open. I got my chance to see the one street besides Main Street that had significant retail. (Main Street is better.) We also learned (or I learned and Bryson remembered) that most decent restaurants in Metuchen are closed Monday nights. Our second choice was one of these.

We ended up at Afghan Kebab House #7. The first food item to arrive after ordering was the salad that comes with the entrees: a small lettuce salad with tomato slices, green peppers, lemon slices (!), and lots of ranch dressing -I like ranch dressing but this was a lot for me and way more than Bryson would put up with-. In short, one of those lettuce and ranch salads some ethnic places serve to make unadventurous dinners more comfortable by showing not all their food is strange.

We also got bread with the standard two Indian sauces (red and green); the bread had a little oil flavor and a slightly more crunchy exterior on one side than I'd like, but wasn't bad in the least.

For an appetizer we tried the aushuk and were served a few thin dumplings well hidden in a dish mostly filled with yogurt and spices. While the yogurt was fine, the dish was disappointing because of the effective lack of meaningfully sized/filled/flavored dumplings.

Our entrees, however, were good. One was a mix of chicken, brown rice, pine nuts, peas, and orange rind. The orange rind was a fairly prominent (good) flavor and worked well with all the other ingredients. The other was a lamb steak -juicy though not particularly Afghani or Indian-, much like (very good) lamb chops my parents used to make.

Although the restaurant was very slow, we still had the rest of the evening to kill and so we watched Annie Hall. I had a general negative impression of Woody Allen from other movies so I figured it would be good for my edification to watch one of his classics. I found, to my surprise, I liked it: it feels funny, witty, sad, and true. And now my opinion of Woody Allen is more nuanced.

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 4 (or, museum messes, strudel, Japanese grill, and Avenue Q)

Once again I started the day off with a bagel and cream cheese. (This time, though, I'd planned ahead so I wouldn't be flustered and decided on a sesame bagel with low fat vegetable cream cheese.)

The day's plan was to go to the city and kill some time before the 8:00pm show of Avenue Q. Avenue Q was on the list of reasons to go to New York; I tried getting half-price tickets a few times while I lived there in 2004, but since the show had just won the Best Musical Tony Award for 2004, tickets weren't available. (And I wasn't willing at that time to pay full price.) This time, however, I wasn't going to risk the unlikelihood of getting half-price tickets and instead purchased some (after much debate about the quality of the seats I wanted and how much I was willing to pay) in advance.

One other activity I missed during my time in NYC was the Museum of Modern Art. Its Manhattan location was under renovation then and so it moved to Queens, and I never made it out to Queens. Well, the renovation had been completed so I planned to spent the day at Moma.

Getting to the city involved the simple purchase of a NJ transit ticket. Well, I almost managed to screw it up -- I was waiting for the train on the same side of the platform as when I went to Princeton. But NYC is the other direction! Happily I realized my mistake before the train came.

After arriving at the endpoint of the rail journey -Penn Station-, I hiked the twenty-something minutes northward to Moma and breathed in the essence of the city. I was back!

And then I found that Moma is closed on Tuesdays. Oops.

My mind was already in the museum mind-set. The only other famous NYC museum I'd missed during my journey was the Pierpont Morgan Library; it was also closed for renovation during my time in the city. While planning my week, I noticed it was still closed for renovation (it's been years!) and due to reopen within the next month of two. But that meant it was out for a destination.

I thought about returning to the Museum of New York, which I'd enjoyed on my previous visit and didn't manage to finish. I'd arrived within an hour of closing; feeling guilty for making me pay, they gave me free tickets to return some other time. However, I'd left my free tickets at home. I believed that fact was a message from fate that today was not the day to return.

Thinking harder, I decided to go to the Design Museum. It was the only museum I could remember not visiting and even feeling remotely bad about. (Most museums I skipped I felt no qualms about.)

After walking north and east in the general direction of the museum for a while, I finally stumbled upon a subway entrance. I felt silly that I'd forgotten where all the stops were in the measly two years since I lived nearby. (This feeling of embarrassment will return again.)

Arriving in the upper east side but before walking to the museum, I decided to head over to someplace on my places to eat in NYC list. The place was Andre's Cafe, an eastern European bakery and restaurant that had been on my list ever since reading the article, The Lost Strudel (New York Times), profiling its production of this hard-to-find item.

The menu portrays itself partially as Hungarian but also offers some ordinary diner-type fare like hamburgers and eggs. But I didn't hover over the menu much other than to choose my flavor of strudel: apple -- fairly traditional, though not quite as traditional as cabbage and not as odd as cherry or potato and ham. My strudel was good, with sizable chunks of apples wrapped in layers of phyllo dough, sweet enough to be a dessert after my bagel but filling enough to complete the meal.

Speaking of bakery items, why is it one can find rugalach at nearly every bakery, deli, and coffee shop in New York but I never see it anywhere in California?

Happily satiated, I went to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It was thoroughly disappointing. They had a vaguely interesting exhibit on "fashion in color," showing how different colors were used in fashion in different times and the affect they portrayed. And they had a small (sad) exhibit on "designs from Israel" which had a neat chair made of straws melted together. (Yes, the plastic ones you drink from.) That is all that is worth mentioning, in both the special exhibits and the museum itself. Despite listening often to the audio tour, I was still out of the museum in less than 90 minutes and promptly wrote in my notes "small and boring."

Now I had lots of time to kill before the show. I took the train back south to check out the menu of another restaurant I recently heard about. (I thought perhaps I could meet some friends there for dinner later in the week.) Then I checked out another such restaurant. (Ah, text messages to Google local is great for addresses of places you know the names of.) I called my parents. (It's the middle of the workday so the people I could call were limited, and I figured they'd love to hear from me while I was on vacation.) Eventually I took the subway and went shopping at Bloomingdale's, looking for a nice professional looking jacket. (You know, those three-quarter length ones that business-people and other professionals wear outdoors.) I browsed for a while, amazed at the size of Bloomingdale's selection, but, despite the late-season sales making the horrendous prices more reasonable, didn't buy anything. (I can't buy important pieces of clothing like that without a second opinion on how it looks.)

For dinner I grabbed the subway to the east village to head to Yakitori Taisho, a Japanese grill place recommended by a friend of mine. I arrived before 6pm and was told to come back after they open. (New Yorkers as a whole eat late.) So instead I killed some time and scouted out another restaurant I heard about in the area, a restaurant that I'd actually return to later in the week (see the post for Friday - Day 6). When I returned, it was after 6pm and they seated me.

I had really good grilled items and excellent french fries at Yakitori Taisho. (The menu offered a lot of different types of choices (mostly Japanese food with some Korean), so I tried to judge what to order based upon which items had the largest pictures and more prominent placement. That got me to the grilled items. And this seemed right, because as other people arrived, that's what they were ordering too. But they could have been using the same strategy as me... The french fries, however, I ordered because a number of yelpers recommended them.)
* One grilled item I got was a very good skewer of chicken meatballs. The meatballs were light, a mix of ground chicken, peas, and corn, and moist.
* The beef skewer, with a tasty juice marinate, was also quite good (but not as good) because the meat was slightly rubbery / hard to rip meat with one's teeth.
* The green onion skewer was very good. (I'd never had grilled green onions before.)
* The french fries with spicy salmon roe mayonnaise were excellent. The french fries came right out of the frier and started out too hot to eat. This caused me a few burns because they were good, dense from potatoes and fatty but not too much so. But the roe mayonnaise made this dish -- a wonderful creamy cool dipping sauce with a unique flavor.
* Still slightly hungry and wanting to try something besides a skewer to further evaluate the restaurant, I ordered one more item: a grilled rice ball with salmon. This was exactly as described: boring. They coated the ball with a sauce that allowed the outside to blacken without burning on the grill -I saw because I was sitting at the counter- but what I ended up with was a dull ball of rice with small overcooked dry salmon chunks inside. Disappointed with this item, already full, and feeling guilty from all the meat and carbs (especially the whole bowl of french fries), I left some of the rice ball uneaten.

Then, yet another subway ride later, I was in the theater district for Avenue Q.

Avenue Q was great! And my nose-bleed seats -in the balcony along the wall, third row from last- still gave me a perfectly good view of the stage. Perhaps the most mesmerizing feature of Avenue Q was that it seemed as if it was being performed simultaneously by two separate casts: the puppets and the actors holding the puppets. Both were on stage and both "acted" -- I kept going back and forth from watching the expressions on the puppets to watching the expressions on the people.

Avenue Q was clearly targeted at people in my age bracket recently out of college and looking for a PURPOSE. And while it dealt with this issue well with songs like Purpose and I Wish I Could Go Back To College, the concluding song to this theme felt a bit like cheating. Basically the message was wait, and everything will get better.

Avenue Q was filled with catchy songs with funny (and likely true) messages such as The Internet is for Porn, Everybody's a Little bit Racist, and even What Do You Do with a BA in English?. Yet the songs that touched me the most were slower: There's a Fine, Fine Line ("between love and a waste of your time") and There Is Life Outside Your Apartment.

In addition to lessons based on the morale and the theme, I learned something else from Avenue Q; I learned through the song Schadenfreude that I'd always been mispronouncing this word.

The only complaint I have about Avenue Q is that they had Gary Coleman as a character. This felt unnecessary, like a source for humor that wasn't relevant to the theme.

After the show I walked straight to Penn Station and arrived back "home" around midnight. One of the most striking features of the day was the number of familiar sights, especially so during my walk to Penn Station as the route was the one I usually used to walk to work during the time I lived in the city.

P.S. I took this small selection of photographs today. (The previous day's Afghan Kebab House #7, today and yesterday's Bagels-4-U, today's Andre's Cafe, today's Yakitori, plus one more photograph...)

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 5 (or, Spamalot, coconuts, and not much more)

My plan for the day centered around Spamalot, another item on my reasons to visit New York list. As the show is really popular, the only ticket I could get was for the Wednesday matinee. (Spamalot apparently has inexpensive standing room only tickets for sale the day of the show, complete with little plaques on the floor about where to stand, but even these tickets usually sell promptly bright and early in the morning. I didn't want to risk not going.)

Before the show, I planned to eat at Barney Greengrass, a jewish brunch place on the upper west side that I'd tried and failed to go to when I lived in Manhattan. (It was closed the day I went.) Barney Greengrass, nearly a century old, is a New York institution, a combination retail market and restaurant. It's subtitled "The Sturgeon King" and famous for salmon and (not surprisingly) sturgeon.

I ordered one of its most famous dishes, salmon scrambled with eggs and onions ($13). It was quite good with ample pieces of salmon (not skimping on the salmon as most salmon and egg scrambles seem to do) but was poorly presented, simply thrown onto a white plate with no decorations or sides. It came with a bagel or bialy and I, having eaten a number of bagels recently, ordered the (onion) bialy. Definitely eh. In all, the scramble was good enough to be worth the money, but I'd really expect more attention to the presentation given the $10+ price tag.

I left over an hour to get from the upper west side to the theater district for my show. This was way more than necessary -in fact I could probably walk there in forty minutes-, but it turned out to be a good thing. At the subway station, they announced that there was "an incident" on a southbound train at the 125th St station and all southbound trains were running express until 59th St. That meant the train would skip me, at 86th St. After some confusion -the station operator was confused and kept telling us the trains were running and would stop and we only learned not to listen to her after a few trains went by on the express track- I grabbed a northbound train to 125th and then transferred to a southbound one. I arrived at the Spamalot theater with more than fifteen minutes to spare and was greeted by a massive line. (They were very inefficient at letting people in.)

Looking at signs while in line I realized that Spamalot was the 2005 Best Musical Tony award winner. Two best musicals in two days!

My seats at Spamalot were poor. Like Avenue Q, I decided to be cheap and buy nose-bleed tickets, this time in part of the theater that said "partial view" but claimed it only matters in two scenes for a total of fifteen minutes. But these tickets were worse than that. They were in the balcony in the last row ten seats from the side, and the curvature of the ceiling restricted by view of things high on the stage. Admittedly I could see the main action in most scenes but I found myself repeatedly slouching to try to get the full effect of events on stages, including actors on castle walls, the really tall Knights Who Say "Ni" (on stilts), and the atmosphere conveyed by the scenery.

Spamalot was pretty good, but nowhere near as good as Avenue Q. Much of Spamalot's quality came from the scenes lifted entirely from the movie; most of these were simply re-enacted (without music). I didn't like that a sizable fraction of the show was devoted to broadway mockery with songs like The Song That Goes Like This ("Once in every show / There comes a song like this /It starts off soft and low / And ends up with a kiss"), You Won't Succeed On Broadway, Diva's Lament ("What ever happened to my part? / It was exciting at the start. / Now we're halfway through Act 2 / And I've had nothing yet to do."), and Twice In Every Show. It's not that these songs were bad -they weren't- it's just that they felt like a crutch to fill up time because the writers couldn't figure out how to make the show long enough just by using traditional Monty Python and The Holy Grail material.

They did have at least one case of very Monty-Python-esque humor (certainly more Monty Python than the broadway parody). For instance, the show started off with a song and dance about Finland that lasted until the narrator interrupted and corrected the actors about the topic of the musical. Going along with this theme, the playbill even had a few fake and very funny pages about the Finland musical that included amusing actors' names and humorous titles for songs.

Some scenes did stand out. The choreography in the I'm Not Dead Yet song and dance was great. I'm also impressed by the audience involvement. In particular, they had a member of the audience find the grail and bring it onstage near the last scene. In addition, at the end they had the whole audience stand up and sing and dance to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

Spamalot clearly knew its audience was much more male-dominated than most broadway ones -- there were lots of women singing and dancing throughout the show.

But perhaps the most interesting event of the day was not Spamalot or the subway incident (which I can't find any news about on the web -- there isn't enough local neighborhood-level reporting) was the coconut orchestra. Spamalot invited the whole audience to move to the courtyard by the theatre, gave them coconuts, and planned to (and did) set the Guinness World Record for the world's largest coconut orchestra.

I got my own set of coconuts (for free) (according to Spamalot's web site, a $15 value) and participated! It fun and fast. I'm surprised how easy it was to learn to play; I guess using percussion instruments to do a tune I've heard many times before isn't that hard. The whole event made minor news: playbill.com, broadwayworld.com.

Before heading home to Metuchen, I decided to spend a little time looking at coats at Macy's. Macy's, like Bloomingdale's, was also amazingly large: seven floors the size of city blocks. But the selection of coats of the type I desired was much smaller (although also cheaper). Of course, by charging $150 for a pair of stylishly ripped jeans, one can't claim Macy's is inexpensive as a whole.

Once back in Metuchen, I believe Bryson, Catherine, and I had dinner and played more settlers.

P.S. I took three sad pictures and one movie this day: one of the brunch place, and the rest of breaking the coconut orchestra record.

On the Art of the Travel Log

Having finally caught up on my New York / New Jersey trip entries (look back in the April and May 2006 archives to read them), I thought this deserved posting:

Admittedly, I'm not very good at writing travel logs. After all, my main audience for these diary entries is myself and what I publish here are really just slightly coherent first drafts of my notes and thoughts.

All the same, I found the discussion with Author Frances Mayes on KQED's Forum on March 31 2006 quite interesting. (Listen if you want.) Mayes was talking about her new book and all the places she lived and described in the book. The theme -move somewhere and live there for a while- is exactly like what I did with Manhattan years ago.

Eighteen minutes into the conversation Mayes talked about being offered bites off of other people's plates and remarked how this doesn't happen in America. In contrast, this happened to me (and similar events) in Manhattan; at the time I said this would never occur in my home of California. Interpret these observations as you will.

Thirty minutes into the conversation I heard an exchange which really describes why I take notes of things I see and think:

Caller: "... [My wife] would look at the notes she took during the day and she would try to write out her narrative. Very important to do that because you can write your own Under the Tuscan Sun when you get home."
Mayes: "I'm so glad he brought that up because I think what he said is so crucial to enjoyment. I see people in cafes writing in their notebooks and I always think that is the most delicious moment in travel, when you're alone in a cafe with your notebook and you're writing down all you've seen. In a way it kind of doubles your pleasure and your perception; when you start writing down what you've done and seen, you see more and it makes bigger associations for you."

Finally, although this quote twenty-five minutes into the discussion isn't really relevant to discussing travel logs, I hadn't heard it before but thought it was very incisive:

"I loved Garcia Lorca's comment about racism in Harlem when he was there studying jazz. He said he could not understand racism because it was in fact a sign of God's creativity."

(Sadly, I could not verify this quote and attribution on the web.)

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 8 (or, cards and home)

Bryson and I spent the morning chilling while waiting for Donald to come up from Philadelphia. Yes, I'm that cool that I can get a techie friend that somehow ended up in law school that I hadn't seen in a year to cross state lines to catch up ( ;> ) and share why and how this transition to law student is going.

Catherine returned home shortly before Donald was due to arrive, so the three of us picked up Donald from the train station and promptly went for lunch, on the way having intermittent awkward conversation because it was late and we were too hungry to think enough to be good conversationalists. It was good seeing Donald again and how he's changed: for instance, law school has made him dress more like a professional. (Not that he didn't dress fine before; it's just a change.) Lunch was a cute deli / market / cheese shop called Marianna, a short walk into downtown Metuchen. (It also has a restaurant / tapas bar / wine bar attached, but we didn't go there.) I had a amazingly large sub called "The Gallina," consisting of a pretty decent and substantial breaded chicken cutlet, the largest and more tasteless slice of mozzarella I've ever had (almost the size of a pounded chicken breast; I removed it after two bites), and some roasted red peppers that added some nice sweetness to the sandwich.

With happy stomachs, conversation came easier. As we talked, we headed back to the apartment and continued talking while playing Crates. Crates is a crazy-eights-like card game on steroids that I played in high school, briefly played with these friends in college, and hadn't played since. It was fun to play it again, and to try out the new deck of cards I specially designed and printed to make playing Crates easier. This served as a good play-test to help me revise the deck. (The end goal is to make the game easier for people to learn so I can convert more people to players.)

Anyway, after a too short time of talking and games, I had to leave to catch my flight and Donald had to leave to head back to catch the train for his evening events. My flight home was uneventful. Like my flight out, the plane was packed and I had a middle seat. Like the flight out, I ended up being perfectly comfortable -- this time seats A and C were taken by a parent and child (a well behaved one at that) that wanted to sit next to each other. So I got promoted to the window seat. :)

I should take vacations more often. And spend more time with friends, regardless of the physical distance separating us. What a great way to spend a week! :)

New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 7 (or, the Brooklyn Museum, Sri Lankan, and a gas leak)

These pictures document my adventures for the day, especially the Brooklyn Museum.

Having stayed up late on Thursday night, I slept in on Friday and got up around 10:30am. Since I'd hoped to meet Bryson and Catherine in the evening, I spent an hour thinking about places to eat and things to do and generally brainstorming and gave them some choices. Once that was out of the way, I headed out for breakfast/lunch and, after a brief internal debate, then was off to the Brooklyn Museum. (My internal debate was because I was somewhat tempted to see Flushing (in Queens) and because I was encouraged the previous night to look around some neighborhoods in Astoria (also in Queens). But the grandeur and size of the Brooklyn Museum -from what I remember from seeing the outside of it when I lived in New York- won out.)

But lunch was a first priority. Since I had known I was meeting Seth on Thursday and Seth was watching his weight, I had previously compiled a list of healthy and vegetarian restaurants in Manhattan that had good reviews. So for lunch I chose a nearby place from the list and went to Rainbow Falafel. Rainbow Falafel took a lot of hunting -- it's literally a hole in the wall. Literally. It's a market that serves food items and is well under a hundred square feet. My falafel was decent but nothing special (and quite messy, making it hard to eat and walk).

While eating, I hiked a bit to grab pictures of Veselka and The Turkish Kitchen, places I'd eaten yesterday but had thought I'd forgotten to photograph. (Apparently I did take a shaky dark picture of Veselka the previous night. If I'd remembered, I might've skipped this extra walking and instead went to the museum earlier.)

Then I went subway hunting, trying to remember where a subway stop was. Eventually I found one, but the fact that I had to wander a bit definitely embarrassed me.

And then I was further embarrassed when I got off the subway at the wrong station. I had remembered the Brooklyn Museum was right at the Prospect Park stop in Brooklyn. Indeed it was, but at a different Prospect Park stop on a different subway line. Rather than take the subway back (infrequent, given how few subways run through these stations) and transfer, I hiked the twenty-five minutes through a shoddy neighborhoods and alongside a sketchy side of the park and found my way to the museum. En route I passed the Brooklyn Public Library, which came in handy later.

Yup, that's a lot of walking today and yesterday. Remind me to wear more comfortable pants next time.

The Brooklyn Museum was definitely a cool way to spend an afternoon. It's an impressive five-story building (see the pictures). I was initially also impressed as I wandered through the first exhibit, Arts of the Americas, and noticed most plaques and signs had been translated into spanish. However, I soon found this property was limited to this exhibit. (I wonder now why they didn't translate other exhibits that have large numbers of speakers of that language nearby, like the Chinese exhibits.)

Many of the exhibits I wandered through at first only marginally interested me, like african art, pacific art (in general), chinese art, korean art, japanese art, indian and southeast asian art, and islamic art. In the process of viewing this series of international art, I found a special exhibit by Antonie-Louis Barye that pretty much consisted of many sculptures of animals killing other animals. Well done sculptures, and an unusual obsession.

The Brooklyn Museum has an impressively large series of exhibits on Egypt. I stayed in this section for quite a while and read a lot of signs because I find the mythology, the pharaohs (and how they fit in with the mythology), the pyramids (and how they fit in with the politics and the mythology), and the hieroglyphs (both as a reflection of language and thought as well as how they relate to the religion) neat. I took a few pictures, including one of a sign with a striking story of politics and religion.

Soon after, I found the small collection of European paintings. They all hung around a large court used for entertaining high-profile guests. (The museum knows what its wealthy patrons most appreciate!)

On the next floor I found a large selection of American artwork and was quite surprised to see how much of it I enjoyed. (I snapped a number of pictures.) I guess I like much of the Hudson River school of painting.

Then I was even more surprised to find a Rodin sculpture exhibit, very much like the one at Stanford. There were only twelve casts made of each sculpture and now I've seen two of the "originals" of many sculpture! Also amusing, the Rodin gallery was named for the Cantors, the same couple that sponsored the Stanford art museum.

Every museum has a permanent exhibit that is traditional but seemingly out of place. In this case, it was a small series of rooms decorated to "19th century decorative arts," basically showcasing furniture and other strategies in interior design. The windows blocking entry to the rooms were so clean I almost walked into one!

Nearby I found an exhibit on glass and glass working. Since I've been thinking of learning it, I read and learned and took some more pictures.

Running out of time, I wandered through the modern art section -it exists, but it's no Moma- and then the visible storage. Visible storage was a lot of glass cubes (temperature controlled) comparatively tightly packed with objects of all types. Labels on each cube listed its contents. You're on your own to spot the object you want within each cube. But it's neat to see this traditionally hidden side of the museum.

Finally, the last (special) exhibit I made it to was William Wegman. It included a lot of odd pieces in various media, much of it involving dogs. He loves dogs. I managed to find one cute video (available online) that was playing on a display there.

With the museum closed, I headed back to the public library, found a computer, and researched our dinner destination for the night. It's a habit I have, getting some idea of what people proclaim is good. Mostly it just make me feel less anxious of choosing what to eat and happier that I gave a restaurant a fair shake. After a bit of research on some review sites, I had a good idea of what people thought. The funny thing about this is the friends I was meeting for dinner did exactly the same thing! :)

Two subways rides and a long walk later -I'd planned to transfer a third time to get closer, but I missed that transfer station by accident of getting on an express train (I think the accident balanced out the increased speed of the express train)- I arrived on time to meet Bryson and Catherine at our dinner destination. From my nominations, they chose a place in the east village called Sigiri. It's the only Sri Lankan restaurant in Manhattan. (There used to be three but the other two closed in the last few years. Apparently Staten Island is where the community lives; it has a number of Sri Lankan restaurants.)

Sigiri was pretty good, although we weren't excited by the appetizers. We started with the appetizer sampler. It contained two-types of fried spring rolls (vegetable and fish, both like those produced by a mediocre Chinese restaurant), accompanied by an overly sweet chile dipping sauce, and along with a fine lentil cake and an interesting fried fish ball. The ball was like falafel in texture but made from a mix of fish and (apparently) potatoes.

Our entrees were focused around something called a hopper, a bowl-shaped pancake -yes, it was naturally curved- much in flavor like Indian dosi. To assemble a meal, take a hopper and fill it with another entree -in our case chicken lamprais-, perhaps add some of the good fried-to-soft-and-brown onions, and wrap it up and eat it like a burrito. The chicken lamprais, a combination of rice, chicken, fish, and hard-boiled egg wrapped in a banana leaf and baked, was tasty and worked well in its role as the filler. The dish was uniformly flavorful throughout, even the rice. Incidentally, one hopper was served with a fried egg inside, and its gooeyness and yolk added a nice undertone and helped meld the hopper to the filling.

We also decided we had to try the (pork) black curry. While the meat was low-quality, the earthiness and depth of the flavor made us still like the dish. We ate it over rice.

Incidentally, I tried a mango-based mixed drink -they called it a cordial- which was nice and not too sweet like most fruit drinks. Bryson had a good and fragrant ginger tea.

With the entrees foremost in our mind, Bryson concluded, "It was good. I enjoyed that." And Bryson and Catherine discussed how they'd order different hoppers (especially more hoppers with egg) and fillings next time they made it there.

Bryson had made reservations for us at a comedy club. So after dinner, another subway ride later we were walking down 23rd in the direction we thought the comedy club was. I claimed we must be going in the correct direction since I lived not too far away during my time in NYC and I recognized places. But when we reached the next avenue, we found out I was wrong and quickly walked the other direction. *sigh* I was too quick to try to reclaim this area of NYC as my home and show off to my friends. Happily, this error didn't make us late.

In fact, it couldn't have made us late. As we walked up the street toward the comedy club we noticed a fire truck nearby. We didn't give it much thought until we were in line at the comedy club, around the corner from the fire truck. Then we saw firemen with gas masks leave from the door we were waiting to go in. And someone came out and announced there was a gas leak in the building -the whole city block- and that the show would be delayed or canceled depending on how long the firemen take to investigate and/or fix it.

We waited around for a little while, gave up, and decided to hunt for dessert. After some failures of Google SMS (it can't do category searches like desserts near an address, only category searches for a city (as far as I could tell)), we wandered around and up 7th Avenue and eventually chose The Bread Factory Cafe near Penn Station. Besides a selection of pretty desserts, it serves a wide assortment of items salads, sandwiches, pizza, pasta, ... (but not at this time of night). We tried desserts -a cheesecake and a chocolate mousse (on top of a soggy rum cake)-, both of which could only be described as fine.

A train back to Metuchen, and thus concluded my last full day on the east coast for this vacation.