Hot Town, Summer in the City

Went to New York for a quick visit this weekend. Saw lots of friends, which was great. Friends from college (i.e., friends from 17 or so years ago), friends from my first job in New York (friends from 9 or so years ago), and some ever-so-slightly newer friends. In fact, N and I had dinner Saturday night with a soon-to-be-married couple, one of each introduced to me by someone in each of the aforementioned groups of friends—and I, in turn, introduced the two of them. (Okay, so it was rather indirectly, and sprang from some initial Internet sleuthing on the part of the interested party. I just made the “real-world” introductions—but come to think of it, even that was by email). Anyway, now they are together, to be married in September. Friends of friends of friends, breeding little ones who will form their own tangled web of friends of friends of friends, and on and on it will go.

Photo lifted from nywatertaxi.com

One of my goals for the weekend was to do some much-needed shopping, specifically on the Lower East Side, at Dolce Vita, my favorite shoe store. I got two great pairs of shoes, but man, I was reminded why I wanted to move out of the city in the first place. There is nothing fun about trying to get around the city on a hot, muggy summer afternoon when the subways aren’t running the way they should be. If I were rich, and/or lived in Manhattan, that might not be such a problem. But since I don’t take long-distance cab rides, as a general rule, and since N and I needed to get back to Red Hook from Orchard Street on a Sunday afternoon, we had to walk through muggy air and across stinky, sticky tracts of blacktop under a hot and hazy sun to get to a train that wasn’t running on the normal route, just so we could wait for a connecting bus at the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn. Ugh. When people talk about the good old days, or how wonderful New York is, I don’t think they’re thinking of 90-minute commutes with a stopover at the Fulton Mall in the middle of a 90-degree summer day.

(We took the Water Taxi from Red Hook to the Seaport, just to avoid the first leg of the trip by bus, but that cost $10 each for a five-minute ride. We joked that we could have swum it (swam it? Someone help.) And I sort of forgot that I get seasick really easily, especially when forced to sit down inside a boat, and not up on deck.)

But my shoes (both pairs) sure are cute.


And I got to see this mullet on the bus. (Unfortunately, I can't rotate these damn cellphone photos. N is on the case....)