Okay, so I promised I'd write this up, and I have watered my plants and dented my inboxes and spent a few hours curled up on my Very Own Bed with a book. It appears to be the hour.
So in brief, on Friday we went out to Northampton, MA, and ate things and bought things. Things eaten included a really completely awesome seafood soup with abalone, shrimp, crab, shredded snow peas, bamboo, stuff, and things in it, as well as some tea-smoked duck and black mushrooms and, later on, gingersnap cookie tea in a pot (as is proper) and some lime ice cream. Things bought on my end include a cute little green hippie sundress and four skeins of
Melody Superwash (two green/purple, one black/red). I suppose I shall be making socks. *g*
Saturday was New York Day. We amused ourselves building hypothetical mix CDs on the drive up (~3 hours, give/take); I think the one we could think up the most songs for was titled
OhSnap!. New York is...
Well.
New York feels to me like they took your standard urban centre and copy-pasted it like fifty times until it fills the entire map. I have no idea how anyone contains it in their head, and when discussed, we suspected that they don't; you just square off your territory and know
that. I'm also not used to that degree of commercial density without, well, a break: a couple square blocks of determinedly residential little Edwardian row houses and lawns or something.
Ironically enough, it is also probably the most comfortable I've been anywhere in the States. Manhattan -- which is where we stuck to yesterday -- seems to work on the space-and-movement protocols I'm already used to, and some of the architecture is similar, and so is the ethnic mix. Between a marathon lunch at a Ukranian restaurant in the East Village with one group of awesome conversationalists (mmm, pierogies) and Ethiopian for dinner in Riverside with another,
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matociquala and I walked from Times Square all the way through Central Park, and just watched things a lot. It was lovely. It had...a cohesion, I guess.
If I get evicted from Canada (touch wood and God forbid), I could totally do that shit.
So yes, there was a huge lunch and a huge walk and a dinner, and then some hanging out and crashing late. A book and a totally natty grey and black checked fedora were bought by me in and around these things. And then, mostly, I got up this morning, took the train to Newark and finagled my way onto that early flight.
Good trip. *g*
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