AngeLog

New York

Driving into NY from DC had the city slowly creeping up on us in darkness. Firstly industrial, then suburban sprawl, sometimes a mixture of both and finally the traffic jam as the bridges and tunnels of Manhattan filled with people entering the city for the evening.

It’s the fourth time I’ve been to NY yet it still takes me a moment to get used to the pace. Stay to the right. Walk without making eye contact. Speak up when spoken to. Know your order when you get to the counter. Don’t stop suddenly on the pavement.

Of course, breaking any of these rules will get you nothing more than a scowl from the people around you. You soon realise it’s all a game and the more you play the more addictive the city becomes. Soon you’re crossing against the lights ahead of the locals and cursing the subway gate when it doesn’t let you through on the first swipe. You start reacting without a thought and become an unaffected urban-dweller.

Needless to say, the buzz of NY was a welcome relief after a couple of days in DC. Driving into Manhattan that night to the endless blocks of tall buildings, busy sidewalks, colour, grit and dirt woke us from our DC slumber.

The East Village would be our home for the next four nights in a warehouse called East Village Bed & Coffee. It’s a simple and excellent idea: own a warehouse in a hip neighbourhood, put a few rooms on each floor, let it run like a share house complete with little signs telling you to clean up after yourself. Provide bikes to share and a dog, Mango, to greet you when you get in.

NY highlights (in small bite-sized chunks)

The food:

Porchetta has six stools and a huge lump of slow roasted pork. The shop front, about 2.5 metres wide, resembles that of an old-fashioned butcher’s with clean white tiles and a big glass window (see for yourself in exhibit A). The pork, slow roasted with garlic, rosemary and fennel, is served either on a roll or on a plate with beans and greens. We also got a chicory salad on the side and crispy potatoes with burnt ends. These ‘burnt ends’ were delightful little shavings of crisp pork – a fairy floss for the meat lovers of the world. Wash it all down with fresh lemonade.

Joe’s Shanghai has been doing soup dumplings, or xiao long bao as they’re known in Sydney, since the mid-nineties. They’re large, highly soupy and are served with the traditional vinegar and shredded ginger. Not quite to the standard of Din Tai Fung in Sydney or the even better Hu Tong Dumpling Bar in Melbourne, but a still a reliable feast. The ma-po tofu on the other hand more closely resembled the American-Chinese food we’d had in the past, too sweet and not enough chilli.

Some French restaurant on Ave A: I love that in NY you can go out for dinner at 10.30pm on a weeknight without feeling rushed or lonely in the restaurant. The food here was fine without being spectacular, but the real joy was its cosy local vibe which somehow made the wine taste better and the moules and frites just what I was looking for.

The outdoors:

The High Line is a new public garden made on top of an disused elevated railway line which once served the meat-packing district. It currently runs from around 8th St to 20th St but it will expand further north with it’s hardy plants interspersed between train tracks and stylishly formed concrete.

The artificial rolling hills and horse and carriages of Central Park are all a bit twee, but the size and placement of this park is hard to ignore. Walking through with the tips of buildings sticking out behind the trees makes the experience feel almost like a movie set. The weather turned cold so we wussed out on the original plan to cycle all the way through it.

We walked through Tompkins Square Park everyday and NY is spotted with little local parks like this one with a many fenced off areas serving different purposes. This East Village one is flavoured mostly with dog-owners and kid-owners, although later at night it seemed a little sketchy but was still harmless.

The culture:

The Tenement Museum is a lot like Susannah Place Museum in The Rocks area of Sydney; social history told through stories of the people who resided in the buildings. The tour starts in front of the bustling little shop on Orchard St with an introduction by the guide – not a dusty old guide, but a young hip one from Brooklyn – then proceeds into 97 Orchard St for the rest of the tour.

Doing The Met Museum and MOMA in one day would perhaps be ambitious for some, but we like to wander through somewhat aimlessly and then leave again before fatigue sets in. The Met’s scale, design and collection is reminiscent of European Galleries, and its setting right on Central Park makes it a beautiful tourist stop. MOMA is always satisfying with the permanent collection, sculpture garden and special exhibitions. We borrowed a MOMA membership card from our accommodation to get us into a member viewing on the new Bauhaus exhibition before it opened. I was so pleased with it that I’ve been carting the very heavy exhibition catalogue around with me since.

From my days of working for a museum I knew The Brooklyn Museum was the envy of all for its ability to experiment online and succeed. I didn’t realise just how much this approach carried over to their actual museum. We happened to be there for Target First Saturday where the museum is open for free until 11pm with performances and a bar. You may have been to after hours events at galleries before but I bet it wasn’t like this. The place was crammed with people of all demographics: the obligatory hip, young scenesters, Japanese tourists, African American families and older locals. It wasn’t about being seen or getting in for free, the museum has become a meeting place for the local community. People stopped to chat in crowded stairwells, kids ran around looking at African art, others lined up for over half an hour to see the temporary rock photography exhibition. While this happened up above in the wings, down on the ground floor a DJ was remixing Billie Jean to a crowded dancefloor and people peered through arches two storeys up to get a glimpse of the action. So the lesson here? Throw out the conservative approach to after hours exhibition viewings and instead let the public experience the museum in the way corporate venue hire clients do.

Washington DC, or, The Canberra Problem

First rule: if you’re going to take an overnight flight, make sure the destination is interesting enough to keep you awake.

In DC I found myself making the same excuses I make in Canberra and talking up the positives of the place. Yes, the parks are lovely and the museums are great but where is the city centre with some sign of life? North-west of Dupont Circle had a certain buzz in the evening and plenty of restaurants and bars. Georgetown was leafy and pretty but it verged on being painfully quaint.

We hired bikes near the Washington Mall area to meander through the monuments and museums. I’m sure American tourists get a lot more from this place after hearing about it in school for years. My main connection was with the Lincoln Memorial where I remembered The Simpsons episode where Lisa went to him for advice. He certainly was imposing in real life. It’s a massive shrine that looks down upon the memorial pond.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was next. It was huge, having to accommodate planes after all. We walked through some old planes and looked at space food sticks, so I can’t really say it was the most riveting museum experience. We then crossed the park to The Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, an imposing building, all stairs, columns and heavy doors without signs. This building was amazing, possibly more amazing than the art it contained. The rooms had the all the ambience and style of a European art gallery but without the crowds. A few rooms in was an indoor garden, green and lush with water features and garden furniture to sit and appreciate. Of course, more marble columns and a high skylighted ceiling.

Across the road at the east wing of the gallery is the contemporary collection. This one impressed with both architecture and content – Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.

It took me a while to pinpoint what felt odd about all of the museums and then it clicked. The only people working in the museums seemed to be security guards. Security guards checking bags on the way in and more guards spread throughout the galleries. They were completely free of the usual information desks, membership signs or art students working between studying. If felt like no one was really curating exhibitions or enhancing the collection. They had a big pile of of great artefacts and art and so it’s just been housed in these museums and forgotten.

Of course, maybe I’d think differently if I’d slept the night before.

San Francisco – down the Mission

Walk down almost any street in San Francisco and you’ll come across someone talking to themselves. Not always crazy people, sometimes it’s people just talking to whomever will listen. Street car drivers, buskers, perky homeless people requesting a quarter, they all add to the ambience which is very different to anywhere I’ve been on the east coast. Maybe it’s the balmy but mild conditions year-round that give this sense that the street is a place to hang out, not just for getting from point A to point B.

Down in the Mission on a Monday night, waiting for a bus, a Cuban band plays unnofficially in a corner square in front of a supermarket. A couple start dancing in front of the crowd and passers-by jump up on park benches to get a better view. We’d just finished a burrito (shared because even a single burrito in the US is family sized) at Farolito Taqueria after discovering Artillery (24th and Mission), a shop full of gear by really local, as in Mission area, designers. At first glance I thought it was just a hipster-den, but beneath the surface it actually had some substance. I walked out of there knowing I was doing my bit for the local community by buying a bag, a dress and a t-shirt for Peter.

Speaking of hipsters, there’s about 10 times more of them in the Mission area since we were last there in April 07, particularly on Valencia. Not that I mind. More cool shops in addition to the bookstores and record stores we visited last time, lots of bike porn (although far too many fixies) and even a decent coffee place.
Given the general low standards of coffee in the US, Ritual Coffee Roasters was quite a find only hours after I got off the flight from Sydney. I ordered a machiato to go and the guy tried to convince me to have it in a real cup in the cafe “to keep the temperature high and not have any paper taste.” I somehow didn’t think their coffee would be so precious to deserve such treatment and I was right. What came was more like a piccolo latte rather than an espresso with a drop of milk, but it was perfectly nice, almost as good as the stuff around the corner from work. I couldn’t believe that people were lining up out the door only to order grande mochas. Surely the single origin goodness wouldn’t come through in a milkshake sized chocolatey coffee? Baby steps, baby steps.

But the hipsters haven’t taken over this area, rather, they sit nicely in the varied pot of cultures. While Valencia is becoming gentrified, Mission St is still full of local stores, and most importantly for me, cheap good food. Mexican, African American and Vietnamese still dominate the area named the Mission because the first outsiders to arrive, the Spanish in 1776, they set the local Native Americans to work building them a mission. It never really turned out so they ended up handing it over to the Mexicans who made something of the area. Two Mission Mexican meals into the trip, I’m grateful for it.

Cotswolds and more

We left Leeds with a day of driving ahead. We loop-de-looped through Sheffield only stopping to give way at the many roundabouts, and there was no time to stop and sit down in Chesterfield despite the enticing name. We were bounding down the M1 for a lunchtime stop in Nottingham, aiming to make it to the village of Nailsworth by evening.

But this was England and this was the M1. Two miles from Nottingham we all came to a standstill and soon traffic stopped flowing from the other direction as well. Turns out there was a major accident further down the road closing off both directions of England’s main motorway. That means everyone was going to Nottingham for lunch! Two hours later and our two mile crawl into Nottingham was over.

On the road again we were on the road south. Somewhere along the way we (I) decided we needed to go via Bicester, just outside of Oxford, for its factory outlet shops which included a Camper shop (yes, yes, the Camper shop tour of the world, I know). The delay meant I only had an hour to choose between pretty shoes, gorgeous leather and soft angora from Pringle before they closed.

It was now around 8pm (and still light, of course) so the original plan to cook at the Cotswold cottage went out the door. We stocked up on food at the supermarket next door but decided to go to Oxford, just down the road, for dinner.

By the time we finished dinner it was getting close to 10pm and we still had about an hour long drive to the Cotswolds and this is where things started to go wrong. Well not so much wrong, as things were’s going as I planned so I started to worry. To summarise: we were low on petrol and there are no open petrol stations at that hour in country England; we were vaguely lost the whole way there, thanks to the confusing numbers and signs of England’s roads; and we realised we didn’t have the street address for the cottage.

It’s just a cottage in Nailsworth. Turns out Nailsworth is full of cottages and we had no way of knowing which was the right one, except for Peter’s memory when he’d been here a good ten years earlier. I couldn’t believe we were in a town where everyone had gone to sleep, in a car with no petrol, looking for a house we didn’t know the address of!

Peter worked out the street quickly enough, and luckily it was daytime in Australia so we could’ve called the relos who know the place more intimately than us. Once we’d found the street we had to work out which of the 6 or so houses matched the description of where the owner said the keys would be left. Acting like cat burglars we felt around the front garden of one house looking for a table and a pot plant. No luck. A couple of houses later we found a gate and a table and a pot plant that had to be the one. The sound of the front door unlocking was the best thing I’d heard all day.

The next day the sunlight showed us just how beautiful the little cottage was. We were in the top storey attic room, three floors up winding stairs from the street. Even the carpeted bathroom with a bath and no shower was cute.

Just down the road from the cottage was the amazing Hobbs House Bakery, which was so good it makes we weep not being near it now. Oh how I love solid English/Irish bread with it’s wheaty flavour that, with a good slab of butter, can’t be matched by any bread around the world. There was also a gourmet grocer, a flower shop and everything else you’d hope for in a stereotypical (but fashionably upmarket) English village.

Over the next couple of days we drove to Bath and Bristol, we contemplated driving to Wales because it was there, and we met up with fellow Aussies who were temporarily working and living nearby Mike, Jackie and Brendan in the quaint town of Broadway for a pub lunch.

On the way back to London we spent a day in Oxford with Peter’s friend Oz who is doing a PhD there in something scarily academic and physics-like. Highlights: burritos for lunch, cookies and milk stall in the market, an insider’s tour of the insides of an Oxford college, long walks through parks, watching people (badly) punting and eating French for dinner.

And that was is for the green rolling hills of England because the next and last stop on the European voyage was London.

Glasgow to the Cotswolds in 10 days – The North

Rumour has it that things are grim up north. Grey weather, rough people, housing estates as far as the eye can see. Well, actually that wasn’t quite the case but it was good to go in with low expectations and then be suitably impressed!

Driving from Edinburgh in our hired VW Passat we couldn’t really tell what the speed limit was. We assumed it couldn’t be more than 70 miles but people were speeding past us at any opportunity. Lesson 1: The UK speed limit is 70 miles but people like to go faster than that.

There’s some beautiful countryside on the road from Edinburgh south west to the Lake District. We met a friend of Peter’s for a Sunday pub lunch in Penrith (mm, chocolate bread and butter pudding) and then continued our journey south.

First stop was Manchester, a sparkling rejuvenated city with a massive mall, a curry mile, a little China town and a nice selection of hipster shops in the Northern Quarter. I can highly recommend staying in the Hilton Chambers around that part of town.

Manchester and Liverpool are both pretty big cities so I only recently realised they’re onlyl 45 minutes apart. So a daytrip to the Liverpool TATE was next on the agenda. We set off early to stop by Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool, to see a massive year long installation by Antony Gormley. Somehow we navigated close enough to the beach to see a brown tourist street sign telling us to go left. Scored! But that was the only sign and there was still a lot of coast to investigate. We decide to wander around from the second car park we pull into. There’s an old lady walking her dogs in the semi-rain and full-wind who I ask for directions. “If I had 20p for every person who asks me that! Keep walking that way and you can’t miss them. They’re staring all the way to New York.”

So we walked on and she was right, we couldn’t have missed them once we got to the right place. I should’ve given her 20p. If you’re ever in the area do drop by because it’s a mighty impressive installation. One hundred life-sized cast iron figures staring out to sea from a semi-industrial piece of coastline. Check out other peoples’ pictures to see for yourself.

The Liverpool TATE is also great. We went to see the temporary exhibition on Gustav Klimt but were most impressed at exhibitions from their collection, of which we only got through one floor.

We had a quick wander through the city centre and were reminded often enough that Liverpool was the home of the Beatles. No time for lingering because there was still Manchester to see more of, including Affleck’s Palace.

Sadly Affleck’s isn’t what it used to be. Or so I’m led to believe given it was my first visit. It’s a big old warehouse building on a corner that for years (since 1982 according to their website) has been a ecclectic and independent market. I think the story goes that the building was set for demolition but then ‘saved’ but a developer/businessman who now runs the market. There were a few more interesting stalls but most of it was aimed at the goth or clubber sub-cultures of the ’90s (or the kids of today just getting into those looks).

Our last city in the ‘up north tour of the UK’ was Leeds. After a few hours exploring the city we headed slightly out of the city to the headquarters of Norman Records. Norman are a mail order CD shop with an excellent weekly newsletter and a broad range of interesting music. Peter organised to check out their office and while he was there, also checked out their store of CDs. Richard, who works at Norman and also plays in a exellent band, put us up in his lovely Pudsey terrace (complete with cute garden and cat) but not until we’d had fantastic Indian at a place called Akbar’s in nearby Bradford. What’s not to love about 2 foot long naan that hangs from a cast-iron rod on your table? Mmm.