New York Revisited

We went to New York with my much better half, and now it’s been officially accepted by her, it’s only a question of time before we move there. Right? We met a legendary poet and activist from the Bowery Poetry Club and he took us out for delicious Cuban food, and told us about his programme for helping people with Alzheimer's syndrome with poetry; we walked around the East Village and Soho, and found a place that served burgers and cottage cheese; we visited the International Center for Photography, but the Fashion Museum was closed; we spent some time in Brooklyn but could not find Junior's, so we had our cheesecake at Grand Central; we dug tunnels through second-hand bookstores; and on the bus back to DC, we finished the first season of The Wire* as we drove through Baltimore.

While still in NYC, we bought ourselves our Christmas gift – a shiny new DSLR camera – and I mention it here because the place we bought it at deserves a description**. It’s this massive photography shop, run almost entirely by Hasidim (closed on Saturdays, of course), and functioning like a gnome workshop, or a goblin-run bank, or something equally fantastic. You choose what you want, a behatted and sidelock-sporting attendant places it in a box, which then travels down two floors via a series of conveyor belts and pulley systems to the behatted and sidelock-sporting cashier, whom you pay, whereupon the box rides over to yet another employee, behatted, as you may have guessed, and sidelock-sporting, too, who hands you your purchase. Awesome, awesome stuff.

*I'm going to go out on a limb here and state, publicly, that The Wire is awesome. It's not even jumping on a bandwagon anymore, is it? It's finding tracks left by the bandwagon in the dirt many years ago, and following them in the vain hope someone from the original caravan has survived.

**Also, to brag about it. But you knew that.