Hidden In France

A tale of two feetsies

Ah.. New York... it is still the best of times. But to my feet it's turning out to be the worst of times.  I overdid it yesterday when I walked around the city from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. Am I really counting 9 hours?  I sat down for lunch so let's take out an hour from that.  So that's 8 hours on my feet.  Now one of my feet is really swollen on top I don't know why. And it hurts, but it was so worth it.  

There is a huge difference between visiting a place and living there for a while.  I get to take my time, and because we have a kitchen, I get to cook. In the morning I go to Union Square, home of a summery farmers market, a shady little park, beets of every color, groseilles (what's the word in English?)boysenberries, and onions freshly pulled out of the ground.  Then there is the Chelsea market down the street where I discovered I could get my already pudgy little hands hand on foie gras.  Frozen foie gras but foie gras nontheless.  Schwartzenegger has made it illegal to buy or sell foie gras in LA, what a killjoy that one.  Our Governator thinks nothing of mass killing cyborgs, but injure just one little goose and he has a hissy fit.  All this to say that when it comes to food, Manhattan is a cornucopia.

Friday I had a New york moment in Union Park at 6:30 in the evening.  The air was heavy, HOT and moist with a threatening thunderstorm.  There was a gazillion people in the streets; wall to wall bodies from the youngest and hippest to the most bedraggled and desperate-looking. Why were they there, I don't know.  Maybe there was a free concert? Maybe this was the place to be? Maybe this is a normal Friday night Union Square sight, but it had to be one of the most cosmopolite gathering of humans on this Earth. There wasn't an ethnic group, class, age, or sexual orientation I could point out as dominant.

 

In New York, everyone looks so incredibly interesting to me. In L.A.I hardly see anyone beside those I already know. I think this is why I can't write or blog here.  The spectacle, the show of life, the learning, the experiencing, the variety, the humanity is all in the streets.

I realize I am a contemplative person.  It's not like i'm 'doing' or 'producing' anything here either. All this walking In New York is not unlike my blog surfing at home, only instead of my fingers doing the hunting, here I let my feet carry me from one sight to another. (Speaking of not producing, notice this is a post about food and people and I manage to illustrate it with images of gardens and buildings. Hmmm...)

Maybe I would get used to it after a while.  Maybe all this pulsating life gets old at some point.  But for now I wonder how I could go back to my sedentary life in LA.  This being said, my feet are telling me that I have been sedentary too long and that there might be no turning back.  My heart and stomach might want to stay in New York forever, but my feet can't wait to take the first plane to L.A. 

life; New York; this moment in June.

Allright July. But the sentiment is there.

My favorite moment of my New York day is when I step out of the building with my ten year old and we walk to his camp which takes place on Washington Square park.  It isn't warm yet, the air has the quality of a spring morning. It's a 30 minute brisk walk and we take a different set of streets and avenues each time. Oh I shudder to show you such mediocre images of such a glorious city, but what am I going to do?  Send you to better photographers flikr pages?  maybe I should.  

Walking under the arch at Washington Square park means I have dropped off my kid and I'm free to roam.  The building to the right is One Fifth Avenue where I stayed once in a lavish apartment 15 years ago. 

Our apartment this time is cool but nothing fancy.  I met two on my neighbors doing laundry in the basement; Roaches the size of cocktail franks. The laundry has ben piling up ever since.

Yesterday, there was a casting call for models on the second floor of our building.  There were models buzzing about the buildings, models at the reception, models in the elevators.  The concierge who spends his days staring mournfully at his Match.com page sure perked up. So did my boys judging from the gratuitous elevator rides all day long.

This is the famous Magnolia bakery on Bleeker street.  The cupcakes taste exactly like the recipe on their book, so if you can't travel, you can still have the cupcakes. There is a long line most of the time and they limit your purchase to ten cupcakes per person I'm told.  Ten only, what an outrage.  I have a minimum 20 cupcake intake so for me baking them is the way to go.  I love the vibe of that place.  The smell of sugar alone is enough to give you diabetes. It's cramped and messy, and not all that hygienic looking, but it feels real and so New York.

This--whatever it is--also on Bleeker street.

I look up a lot in NYC.  

I can because New Yorkers adore their dog but not as much as they love to gather their poops in professional looking blue plastic baggies.  It's a particular ballet in the morning: glamorous pooches at the end of designer leashes crapping everywhere, and their owners;  fancy people with a fifth Avenue or Park Avenue or Grammercy Park address, the rich, powerful kind that bows to no man fretting about the turd, careful not to leave a morsel behind. 

It reminded me that nothing puts a smile of French lips more than paparazzi photographs of stars (they call them pipole, as in 'people') holding their dog's poop bags.  Note to self:  when you arrive in Paris, remember to always look down. 

Speaking of Grammercy Park. It looks so tantalizing in there, full of statues, and shade,and rare plants but it's a private park.  Private!  That's like limiting people to ten cupcakes, what's with THAT?

I wanted to take pictures so I pulled madly at every door.  For the life of me I could not find the entrance, that's how clueless I am.  So I took pictures of the surrounding buildings.

I better go, because you know what happens when I'm blogging:  I'm not in the streets being a tourist.  

By the way, I have not read your blogs in days --sorry-- due to the call of the wild.

Manhattan I love you.

My first impressions of New York city.

Toasters here only grill one side of toasts. Kitchen cabinets are stocked with four plates, four glasses, tree forks and two dull knives. There are three towels to share between the four of us.

No, okay, this might not be typical of New York, but nothing here resembles my regular life so i thought I should point this out.  For example, speaking of not so typical: my husband works all night and comes home at 5 or 6 am.  At 7:30 I wake up the kids and we get ready in utter silence not to wake up the man.  We creep outside of our very cool, grungy, awesome apartment on 15th street and 7th avenue and there....

KAZAM!  It's New York City baby!  It's loud and busy, there are cabs and bicycles zooming to and fro, air conditioners everywhere make the whole city hum. Honking is the name of the game, also screaming at drivers when you're on bikes and vice versa. Pedestrians don't scream at strangers because they can't make a quick exit but you know they want to.  Their rebellion manifest itself in their refusal to respect street signs; they just advance or stop at busy intersections according to a logic that still escape me, but I'm trying to crack the code.

For us insulated LA folks who live in our cars and only see people we are scheduled to meet, there sure are a lot of interesting and strange looking people in the streets, everyone full of purpose, everyone going, going, going.  Women are pretty at all ages and wear summery dresses.  Men for the most part are dressed so metrosexual that I have no idea who's gay and who's not (My guess is everyone is to some extent.  As I walk with my 17 year old, believe me when I tell you that I'm not the one men are checking out.)

Manhattan is expensive.  5 dollars for a box of Oreo cookies or a box of kleenex?  I know this is kind of an island but in Hawai they have the excuse of hundreds of miles between them and the mainland.

By 9 am I have dropped off my 10 year old to his geeky video game design camp at NYU and my 17 year old has walked himself to film camp at the School of Visual Arts. Then I'm free as the wind until my husband wakes up.  Today i shopped at a delicious farmers market, checked out the YMCA for some classes, smelled the air, stared at people, took pictures too pathetic to post here and basically absorbed NYC's awesomeness in the hope it will rub off on me.

I don't want to write, I don't want to blog.  I want to be in the streets of Manhattan right this minute.  I'll talk to you soon.

Mustard Seed and Moonshine

This will be my last post until I touch ground again.  Leaving for six weeks is a huge deal to me.  I'll relax once I get there but right now I'm stressed. As of yesterday I wasn't even sure I had found a house sitter. I hope to take pictures in NYc and Paris even though this is no gift to you because, lets face it, my pictures suck. 

To leave you with images pretty  enough to last a few days, here is the phenomenal work of artist Kate Carlyle, of Mustard Seed and Moonshine.  

Dishes inspired by nature, good enough to eat on everyday and to serve as museum pieces down the line.

 

Here is what Kate says: 

"We are a studio in Cape Town, which I started in 1992 with one person and it has grown very organically into 34 people with almost no turnover of people at all ……….so all the people who started with me are here still.  We all have a passion for flowers and everything is based on the botanical form…….in fact as a little girl I was incredibly fortunate to visit the Harvard Glass flowers (my father was a scholar for a year at Harvard until we returned home here to SA)and I remember being completely transfixed by these fantastic feats in glass and minute details of nature."

Delphiniums

Irises

How unbelievably pretty, a whole collection of ramequin-flowers!

Seriously, I want to have nothing but flowers in my cupboard now.

I dig her way of doing business.  Art, a lot of heart and passion, a commitment for her enterprise to be a home where employees can grow and blossom, and an eye for excellence.  That's one great business model.

I feel a bit lost because I have not been reading your blogs for days.  What's going on out there in your worlds?  Next post will be from NYC if I survive the next 48 hours.