I was on vacation for the week, so I don’t have much new to report here. I finished reading Dracula, and tonight I plan on starting In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales by Lord Dunsany.
New York City
We arrived in NYC via train on Tuesday afternoon, and that night we went to Crown Shy for dinner, where we had this incredible dish of asparagus, morel, and paneer korma with pine nuts.
On Wednesday, we walked through Central Park on our way to the Frick Collection, which was great, and on the way back we walked behind a true New Yorker—a woman in her sixties, at least, with an ostentatious fur coat, patched skinny jeans, leather boots, an elaborate blue and gold scarf, and Air Pods, power-walking for at least ten blocks and continually stepping out into traffic with no regard for the crosswalk signals.
That night we saw Hadestown at the Walter Kerr Theatre. It was… okay. The music was a little bloated and repetitive. The play vacillates between Hades being the realm of the dead and Hades being an industry town in a way I feel just doesn’t work—they try to have it both ways so they can talk about Hades building a wall to keep out poor people. I was worried at the beginning of the second act that the rest of the play would be a tedious political metaphor, but I was saved by the play’s meandering lack of cohesion. Also, the actors playing Hermes and Persephone were the best singers by far, but shouldn’t Orpheus be the best singer? Orpheus’s actor wasn’t that good!
Thursday we went to Wave Hill Public Garden in the Bronx, which was beautiful, especially at this time of year. Their greenhouse isn’t that large, but they have so many interesting succulents. In the evening, we had drinks at Sloane’s, which was very fashionable—the staff were wearing such stunning outfits that it felt like they were video game characters and we were NPCs. Finally, we went to Soba Ulala, a new soba noodle place, which was delicious, especially the mochi and red bean paste dessert.
On Friday we went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It had a whole field of cherry blossoms in bloom, which was beautiful, but on the whole it was too crowded and touristy and I prefer Wave Hill. After that we went to the Brooklyn Museum, which is right next door. I didn’t care for it—I’m not interested in contemporary art (and especially contemporary art criticism—there was one exhibit of old 18th century paintings where they put the paintings low to the ground as a mark of shame and had plaques explaining how both the painter and the subject of each painting were racist colonialists and that the paintings should be destroyed). Of the five floors, only two really had any art I liked, and I felt the curation was poor. We ended up just quickly passing through the second half of the Egyptian section. They did, though, have the Rubin’s Tibetan Buddhist meditation room on display—the Rubin was probably my favorite museum before it closed and its collection was scattered around the globe. For dinner we had Peruvian food at Pio Pio—it was better than some of the Peruvian restaurants we have been to, but not great.
Saturday we had brunch at Lillie’s Victorian Establishment, which was decorated with more fake flowers than I have ever seen in my life, and then took the train home. ❦