Archive for the ‘Wanderings’ Category

I decided to spend one of my last free weekends in New York. It’s a long way away. I left my apartment at 9am on Thursday morning and got to the law school at 7:30pm. I’m not looking forward to regularly giving up a day to get to and from work.

I like New York much better when it’s not hot. In general, I like New York. I’m not sure why. I feel like I should hate it, and perhaps I’ll learn to, but for now, I’m too amused.

On the subway back to Brooklyn after getting a beer with Kelsey, I remembered how many people you get a chance to see on a daily basis in New York. Quite a bit more than the half-dozen I’m likely to interact with in a less urban setting.

A group of people got on, and had a long discussion about which of them should sit down in the two spots on the seat next to me. Only one of them eventually sat down, and the others kept standing. A fellow behind them politely asked if any of them were going to sit there, and they said no. Uncannily polite for the Subway–you don’t ask, you just sit. It was obvious the guy was a New Yorker; out of the millions, there’s bound to be a few polite ones. After a little while he asked me if the C train stopped at Fulton. Since it goes down Fulton for a long way, there’s a dozen stops “at Fulton”, so I wasn’t sure what he meant. I told him I didn’t know, but pulled out my map and handed it to him. He laughed and consulted it. He asked if I were a New Yorker, and seemed surprised that I wasn’t, but allowed how that explained why I had a subway map in my pocket.

I manage to not stand out as a tourist, but I don’t look like a New Yorker. I certainly don’t dress correctly. BDU’s and a flannel shirt is just not acceptable attire. New Yorkers seem to put quite a bit of effort into how they dress. They wear double-breasted coats, not gore-tex shells.

Tourists, on the other hand… I walked down 42nd street today and heard two tourists talking to each other about catching a cab to Times Square, since they weren’t having any luck finding it. They were standing at the corner 42nd and Broadway. Apparently the billion watts of lights weren’t enough for them to catch on.

Sweatshirts. Tourists wear sweatshirts. I don’t think anyone else here does. Course, they also wear gore-tex shells and stand on street corners with streetwise maps, something I do often.

Last weekend we took a jaunt to the Seattle area. My sister Stephanie and her family just moved up there right after Christmas. They live on the Kitsap Peninsula, just south of Bremerton and across the Puget Sound from Seattle. Nathan carpools with one of us coworkers every day to work driving an hour south across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and up to Seattle. The other option is the ferry, but it takes a long time, and you have to be there really early to get a space on it.

We had been planning to leave on a six p.m flight, but Berck looked at the loads that afternoon, and there weren’t very many empty seats and a lot of non-revs like us registered to get on it. We’re at the very bottom of the totem pole, so it seemed like we’d be taking the late flight. Berck called me a little after three to say that, when he went to change our reservations, the flight had cleared up substantially. “Let’s go!” I said, so he threw together the rest of his packing and ran out the door.

Then he called me from I-25 to say traffic was completely stopped. “If it’s like this all the way to Denver,” he said, “we’re never gonna make it.” I can see I-25 from my desk, and it was flowing freely. I walked him to the back roads, and Berck picked me up about half an hour later than we’d planned, but with enough time if we used a new trick.

Security was backed up a long way, but Berck went to the crew line, flashed his crew badge, and told the TSA agent, “She’s with me.” That got us straight to the ID checker and onto the magnetometers. Woohoo! We got to the gate with plenty of time for me to go to the bathroom one more time.

Now we just had to wait and see if there was actually enough room on the flight for us. They started boarding the flight before calling up all the standbys to give them seat assignments–never a good sign. Then they called up a bunch of other standbys but not us. Uh oh. But finally, they called “Nachzen, party of two,” and we were set. I called Nathan as we walked down the jetway to tell him he wouldn’t have to wait for the late flight to pick us up from SeaTac. Unfortunately, we couldn’t sit together. Berck was lucky and got an exit row seat by the window, but I was stuck between two big guys–not much elbow room. I got some reading done and enjoyed watching the in-filight TV with my new headphones, though.

It was raining when we arrived, of course. Nathan drove us to his house, where the boys had waited up to see us. We all had some of the wonderful sourdough bread Berck had baked and brought (TSA sent his bag holding the huge loaf through the X-ray machine twice).

Berck and I woke up at six thirty in the morning, half an hour later than we usually get up. The boys were up soon after, and once everyone was dressed, we all drove to a local little airport to eat at the diner overlooking the runway. Ian insisted on sitting next to me and then got syrup on my pants. I don’t mind.

We noticed some cars racing around the closed off old runway, so we got in the car and drove over to find the track. They let us in at the gate as long as we signed a waiver saying we wouldn’t sue anyone. There was just a driving school going on sponsored by the Alfa Romero club, though there were only three Alfas there. There were also two Vipers, so Nathan was very excited about that. He’s wanted a Viper for as long as I’ve known him, and he’s agreed to buy one from a friend of his as soon as the guy gets back from Hawaii.

We took the long, scenic way home, and the boys conked out in their car seats. They woke up when we brought them in, though. Elliott was put to bed with instructions to finish his nap, but we could hear him running around in his room and singing. But as long as he didn’t open the door it counted, apparently.

Nathan was still recovering from the cold/flu he’d gotten from Dad that Dad might have gotten from us, and he didn’t feel like doing much of anything, so we just hung around the house for the rest of the day. Steph made us excellent grilled cheese sandwiches from the rest of Berck’s bread. We also had orange smiles that Ian gushed over with each bite. “These are soooo delicious!”

The boys, Nathan, Berck, and I built endless towers with the cool cardboard blocks my mom got, which Elliott knocked down accidentally and Ian on purpose. Ian and I made a domino row with all the blocks all over the living room while Stephanie tried, sometimes in vain, to keep Elliott from running into them. After watching them all tumble over in order, Ian jumped up and down and screamed, “Do it again!”

We got ready in time to catch the ferry to Seattle to go eat supper. The boys fell asleep again on the short trip, but when we got to the ferry there were already too many cars in line for us to get on. We decided to get some coffee at the little espresso shack set up just for ferry customers and wait the hour until the next ferry left, especially since the boys needed their nap and were dead asleep in the back of the car still. But in the time it took Nathan to buy a ticket and pull up to the espresso shack, they’d put up a closed sign. Stephanie said we should go up and ask them if we could just get some water, because Berck had just swallowed a Sudafed. The girl inside slid open the window and said she hadn’t started cleaning up yet if we wanted something. A bunch of other people showed up with coffee cups in the hour we were waiting in line. I wonder if they get bigger tips if they keep the closed sign up and just offer to make coffee because they “hadn’t cleaned up yet.”

The boys woke up before we got on the ferry. The ferry made a stop at an island on the way to Seattle to drop off some cars and pick up some more. I watched the process leaning over the upper deck and was amazed at how inefficient it was. But we finally got to the other side of the sound and found the Thai place where we’d been promised “crack chicken.” The chicken was indeed amazing. In fact, everything there was delicious, especially the fried squash, strips of what tasted like butternut, battered and deep fried and served with a soy sauce.

We took the long way home. You only have to pay for a car coming east on the ferry, but you have to pay for all of its passengers as well on the way back. And you have to pay to cross the Tacoma Narrows Bridge going east but not west. So if you take the ferry over to Seattle and the bridge back, you’re spending the least amount of money.

The next morning we got up and got breakfast in Gig Harbor at a little cafe. They had French toast made from baguette slices and smothered in praline sauce. I get a toothache just remembering it. Berck ordered the breakfast burrito, which he described as “something they’d heard of and thought they’d try to recreate.” That’s what he gets for ordering breakfast burritos at a cafe. Apparently, good Mexican food is hard to come by in the Northwest, while Asian food is the best outside of Asia itself.

Stephanie took the boys to the bathroom before we left. Elliott came out after achieving success and announced to a couple eating nearby, “Boo boo.”

Next it was onto the air museum. There are lots of pictures of plane parts in the gallery and not pictures of little boys looking at planes because Berck had the camera. The boys loved the place, especially the interactive things like being able to climb into a Blackbird cockpit. Ian has announced that, when he grows up, he wants to be a pilot like Uncle Berck.

We had plenty of time to exhaust the museum before it was time to go to the airport. The boys were exhausted too and conked out in the few minutes it took to drive SeaTec. Berck and I had plenty of time to get to our gate, cutting in front of everyone with his crew badge again through security. We got a sandwich to split and a couple of soft drinks then studied for his upcoming exam until it was time to board. We got to sit next to each other this time and spent the flight watching a movie. We even got home before my bedtime.

In the morning we got up and out in time to make it to a restaurant that serves Dim Sum on Sunday mornings as they opened. I’ve never had Dim Sum, and I can now say that I love it. Chinese women circled the restaurant carrying trays of little covered baskets with food inside. They would tell us what delicacies they held, but of course we couldn’t understand what they were saying in their heavily accented English. So they would open up a basket to display their wares, and we would guess whether it would be tasty or not. We ate all sorts of dumplings some dinner rolls that actually were stuffed with minced meat, a green vegetable that looked like a weed and tasted like grass but came with a yummy thick, sticky brown sauce to dip it in, squares of slightly sweet paste with small chunks of meat in it, a plate overflowing with calamari, green beans in a delicious sauce, and other things. I wanted to try to the chicken feet, but I would have had to have eaten the whole basket myself. We ate and ate and then were sorry we couldn’t sample some things because we already had too much on the table. Fortunately, almost everything came in threes, so there was one for each of us. There was also hot sauce and some mustard with amazing sinus clearing properties. Forks were nowhere to be seen, but we managed just fine except for the slippery round green vegetable that I just ate with my fingers.

Afterward, after having only a pot of tea to share to drink, we stopped at a gas station to fill up Dave’s car with insanely expensive Californian gas and grab some Cokes. Then it was on to “SF” with the top down to the SFMOMA. It has a very nice collection. Some of my favorites were a portrait of Truman Capote by Irving Penn, a guy who creates huge backlit photos of staged scenes, basically carefully creating a realistic painting but without the paint, and a Japanese lady who creates “class photos” where she plays all of the students and the teacher by shooting herself in different hairdos, uniform arrangements, and expressions. There was also a good assemblage of canonical modern art from Matisse to O’Keeffe to Rothko to Warhol, even one of Duchamp’s many Fountains. As usual, I had to wait for Berck to finish, so I deposited myself in front of one of the video displays, an interesting one showing adolescents outside a club, instructed to be in front of a camera for several minutes at a time, a study in the uneasiness of the space between childhood and adulthood.

When we had exhausted the exhibits, we went to the Exploratorium, a huge science museum packed with kids mashing the buttons on all of the interactive displays. Still, there were more exhibits than kids, so there was always something interesting to see. My favorite was the heart beating in the fertilized chicken egg. I’ll have to dig out a magnifying glass next time I bake.

We had to leave before too long to make it to our last restaurant, the famous San Tung 2. (I don’t think #1 exists.) I’d discovered this place on a Google search for “crack chicken.” The wet dry-fried chicken wings were indeed good, think General Tso’s wings, but weren’t what I’d call addictive. The hot and sour soup was crammed with solids including “tree fungus” that tasted good but was the consistency of what the fungus you see on trees is what you’d imagine is like. The noodles with black bean sauce were only good after adding soy and hot sauce. But the fried dumplings… those were delicious, even if they didn’t give us any dumpling sauce. Again we were not offered forks but were given a pot of tea.

We ate hurriedly and left to make sure we got to the airport in plenty of time. Security didn’t take any time at all, and then we checked the monitors. Our plane was an hour and a half late arriving. We had a couple beers and found a quiet corner of the airport with a power outlet to finish watching the movie we’d started on the way in, then began another. We didn’t get off the ground until 9. We finally got home at 1:30 am. I drank a lot of tea the next day at work to stay awake. Last night we went to bed at 8. I didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at 7.

There are pictures, but Berck is controlling them. So you’ll have to ask him if you want to see any.