Advertisement
Published: November 20th 2010
Mom at Yona Schimmel's
100 year old knisherie!This blog is mostly for my New Zealand friends,some of whom may not have seen much of the East Coast of the USA. Also it is a chance for me to show off my family a bit!!
Mostly this blog is about a short 3 day trip that my Mom and I took to New York City, which is about 90 min from where we live in New Jersey. However, I have also included some pictures of other highlights of my trip here: my first stop in Las Vegas where Becky joined me for the ACEP conference, a weekend visit to Washington, DC to visit my brother Mark's family, my surprise visit from my son Jeremy who flew in from Italy to see me (!) before returning to the Maltese Falcon to cross the Atlantic Ocean, my nephew David's and Rand's niece Robin's stupendous Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, and my slightly late celebration of my daughter Rachel's 21st birthday when Becky and I took her to Atlantic City for her first casino experience. There have been many more adventures during this trip, as well as catching up with good friends and way too much eating!! Who wants to walk off calories with
me upon my return to Whangarei?
By the way, for those who may be perplexed about the "bialy' it is kind of a cross between a bagel and an English muffin, and is a bread that I have missed a lot in NZ.
NY City Nov 15-17, 2010 “A sort-of Culinary Tour of NYC”
Mom and I took the Greyhound bus to NYC Monday morning (OK, our 8:30 am bus was unceremoniously cancelled and we had to wait for the 9:40 bus) and walked up 8th Ave to our hotel, the Amsterdam Court, wonderfully located at Broadway and 50th. There is a great food market called the Food Emporium on the corner, which was handy for breakfast (and yummy sea salt dark chocolate bars). We dropped our bags in our room and took the subway downtown to the Chelsea Market, which had lots of upscale food stalls. With not much time for lunch, we mostly looked at the amazing array-everything from Fat Witch Brownies and beautiful artisan breads, to whole lobsters being eaten off paper plates (!), shared a quick spinach quiche at the Italian stall, and then made our way down to Greenwich Village
Jeremy at rest
visiting Mark and Nancy, a rare moment for Jeremy for our 2 pm walking tour with NYC on Foot. This is a free service and the guides work for tips. We had a very informative and entertaining guide called Renee who gave us a good overview of the history of the area with some facts about famous sites, architecture, etc. Many of the streets were places neither of us had ever seen.
We then took the subway uptown and meandered along Lexington Ave with a stop in Bloomingdales before our dinner meeting with Kevin and Diane. We really enjoyed seeing them and catching up.
On Tues we left our hotel early, and after breakfast at the Food Emporium, again took the subway downtown, this time to the Lower East Side. We were in search of Yona Schemmel’s Knisherie, a 100 year old institution. Despite recently having finished breakfast, for historical and culinary reasons we shared a “morning tea” potato knish. Then we wandered around the Lower East Side, and found our way to the Tenement museum which provided a self guided walking tour. Along the way we serendipitously found a BIALY store (you can’t imagine the excitement of this) where we purchased a super large
Chelsea Market
some yummy stalls at the market bialy, a prize which we brought home. This was pretty close to Mom’s ideal bread from her childhood called an “onion board” which is pretty hard to find these days-although I did make her one with my recently acquired bread baking skills. We also got some chocolate ruglach cookies at a kosher bakery next door, for later snacking. Much of the Lower East Side is still a melting pot with much less current Jewish presence and a much larger Asian presence. Chinatown appears to have spilled over into both the Lower East Side and Little Italy as well. (We did find Little Italy on Mulberry Street-cannoli and almond cookies, of course)
Aunt Joy was meeting us for the day so we zipped uptown on the subway and met her at the Museum of Sex. We could have gone to an art museum, or…not. I’d read about this place and was anxious to see how they would tackle this subject in a museum. After all, there are museums of all kinds of sociological phenomena. As expected, there was some humor (we started in the café called “Oral Fixes” where Joy had an aphrodisiac chocolate drink and we ate the
Greenwich village
old stables converted into some fancy houses in the city aforementioned ruglach) and the gift shop was a bit racy, but mostly I think it was a very thoughtful display. The first floor was devoted to the history of sex in films, starting from the silent films, and explored what aspects of sexuality were considered appropriate (or not) and how this has changed over the years. In parallel, they acknowledged the non mainstream porn films starting from stag films and how the porn industry has operated, but it wasn’t done in a prurient fashion. For many years “sex” was only permitted to be implied but not shown (ie fade out on the kiss and show the train entering a dark tunnel as in “North by Northwest”) and early nudity was limited to depictions of bare breasts in racial minorities only, ie the South Seas dancing girls. “Sex symbols” from the early days of film, like Greta Garbo, Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe, were introduced-and seem so tame now. Subjects like homosexuality have only recently permitted to be discussed openly in mainstream films.
The second floor was devoted to “the condom” and safe sex primarily, (and sex in art and some kinkier stuff) and the top floor was quite
Renee
our guide from NYC on foot interesting and discussed the sexual habits of animals. So overall I think the museum did a good job from an academic and entertaining standpoint.
We then had dinner at Tricolore, an Italian place near Broadway, and then we went to see “Promises, Promises” a revival of a 1970’s Neil Simon musical. The dancing and singing were fantastic, and although the show is a little dated (it depicts the business world in NYC in the early 1960’s) it was very enjoyable. However, the topic was a bit sad, as it dealt with sexual liaisons in the office-particularly the predatory middle aged, mostly married managers taking advantage of the young secretaries whose job status and promotions often depended on these creepy guys. In that decade, women did not ever advance beyond secretary status-there were certainly no women executives!!-so they were not in the least empowered, and as most of them were in the market for husbands, they were often exploited.
Wednesday morning we took Joy’s advice and breakfasted at Ellen’s Starlight Diner, right near our hotel, where upcoming singers/actors both wait tables and entertain the diners by singing, and they were fabulous!!
We decided to stay
Christopher Street
home of the gay revolution in the USA in the Midtown area and walked around Rockfeller Center, where the Great Tree is being put up for Xmas, and we strolled down Fifth Avenue where all the grand stores are. Personally I think the smaller side streets are the more interesting ones, but it was fun to see these too. We headed back towards Port Authority bus station, thinking we would check our bags there, but discovered that there are no longer lockers available since 9/11 and Greyhound is the only organization that will hold your bags for the princely sum of $8 per bag. No, thanks, I‘ll drag my bag around instead. Someone should open up a reasonable off site baggage holding service near the bus station!
The last afternoon we had matinee tickets to see “Love, Lost and What I Wore” by Nora Ephron. This was a comedy/dramatic reading by 5 women actors, a cast that changes quite frequently, similar to the Vagina Monologues. It was a series of memoirs by women and explored how major events in their lives are often intertwined in their memories with what they remember wearing at the tme. Obviously, it was a 97% female audience!! We enjoyed it and
Huxtable house
Remember the Cosby show? The facade for their house was this one in Greenwich Village agreed that there are many universal memories and themes shared by many women.
We then dragged our luggage over to 46th Street, restaurant row, and decided to have Thai food for our early dinner/late lunch. For $11 the early bird provided delicious tom kha gai (chicken coconut broth, one of my favorite soups), a salad and an entrée. I had chicken in satay sauce and Mom had cashew garlic sauce. It was excellent Thai food for a great price in NYC (Bangkok something).
We then caught the 5:30 Greyhound direct bus to Mt Laurel and were home just after 7 pm.
Be sure to click on page 2 to see all the pictures, and for those who are new to my list, you can see all the older postings if you'd like to as they are all archived on this site.
Back to New Zealand Dec 2!!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.126s; Tpl: 0.047s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0495s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
