From Beantown to the Big Apple

The good thing about living on your own somewhere is that you are free to do whatever you please. For me, this meant acting upon a random desire to go to New York over the weekend and hopping on an early-morning Chinatown bus on Friday.
For someone who always looked at $350 tickets to one of my favorite cities with a certain longing, spending fifteen bucks on a crummy old Fung-Wah felt like heaven.

I arrived in New York Chinatown roughly four hours later and made my way to the Subway in the pouring rain to stop over at Colin's "Skypad" (a beautiful hideout on the tenth floor of an Upper East Side apartment building) for lunch. Plans to wander around fell through due to the water pouring from the sky, but I caught up on homework instead and then met my Aussie friend Jo and her man James for some soup dumplings and a good chat in Chinatown before heading out to Yonkers, NY to spend the night at their funky basement studio.

The weather luckily cleared up and allowed for a boat ride, a hot "dawg" and some live music in Central Park the next day, followed by a 65-block walk through Manhattan with Sascha. I had the honor of being Sascha's first official visitor since his move to NYC a year ago, and got a tour of his Noho neighborhood and a peek at some of the work he did at art school last year.

We met up with Colin again for dinner at Perbacco in the Village before I crashed on a cozy mattress on the floor of Sascha's room.

Sunday we did 8 a.m. Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer and had a nice brunch at Pandora's before I headed back down to Chinatown with Sascha and caught the 12 o'clock bus back to Boston.

No Empire State Building, no Times Square, none of the usual touristy stuff - but I have the feeling that I drank in more New York spirit than during any of my previous visits.

That Apple, I just love it.

My picture-taking discipline was a bit on the weak side this time (for example, not a single graphic record of my reunion with Jo), but here is a selection.

Some NYC architecture

Colin on The Lake in Central Park (Can you believe this is New York City??)

Mag in the row boat (the only women workin' the oars on the entire lake!)

Sascha and his apartment on Bleecker Street