Appreciating our hometown

Today was the day C.Z. and I spent being tourists in our own town. We'd been planning for a month to do this the first chance we got. New York City is so big that you can explore it forever, so we should appreciate what's out there, right?  The idea was to hit several different neighborhoods and appreciate their long-time institutions.  And most of the institutions you can hit several in one day like this are shopping institutions, so that's where we went, even though we're not big shoppers.  We went for atmosphere.  

We left around 10:30 this morning, and the first thing we did was to buy all-day Metrocards for the subway. Buying them didn't save that much money, but we wanted to feel free to make as many swipes as we wanted, to add to the feeling of being intrepid explorers.  Wouldn't you know it, though, as soon as I started to buy that second card, we heard the train coming.  "Just use the card you already have," C.Z. implored.  "We can get the other one later."

"This day isn't about hurrying," I reassured her. "It's okay if we miss it."  Then I proceeded to harbor just enough hope of making the train anyway to really bungle up the purchase of the second card so that it took forever.  Machines seem to know when you're hurrying, even when you're trying not to.

Fish market in Chinatown

Our first stop was Chinatown.  A big reason people go to Chinatown is to feel like they're getting good deals.  It's the home of the knock-off.  Of course shoppers know that the goods are cheap and the proprietors are sharp bargainers.  Of course we knew that we were paying to go all the way downtown to save a few cents on goods we could probably get in our own neighborhood Asian mart.  And of course we knew that we'd have to slog around our purchases for the rest of the day.  But this day was all about going places in the city and enjoying them for what they were known for, and so we went bargain shopping in Chinatown.    

First C.Z. trolled the trinket shops.  Trinket shops have tables on the street with typical tourist fare--jade bead bracelets, little Buddha statuettes, coins with holes in the middle, pretend samurai swords, and paper fans.  Inside are more expensive goods, like electronic clocks with aquaria on TV screens, or light-up Zen fountains.  To her surprise, C.Z. found after going in about three shops that she had outgrown the desire for trinkets.

We moved on to Tongin Mart.  That's where I go to buy Chinese condiments.  I bought the same low-sodium tamari that I usually buy, but cheaper.  I eyed the rice wines, and decided to go for something really obscure.  I couldn't even read the label except for the ingredients and the words "rice wine"; the rest was in Chinese.  Those two bottles were heavy, so I decided to skip the oyster sauce and just get some toasted sesame oil.  I pondered the masaman curry pastes, but left them alone too.  C.Z. and I took a long look at the dishware before proceeding to the checkout, but decided to look elsewhere first.  

The next stop was a dollar store across the street.  This is where I usually purchase chopsticks. Since the ones wrapped with thin plastic designs usually start peeling after you mix wasabi with their blunt ends for a while, I like the plain wooden ones.  You can buy a whole packet for about $3, but I didn't need that many, so I got two sets for a dollar.  We looked over the dishes, but they looked particularly stamped and fake.  We headed back to Tongin Mart.

Here we had a problem:  We both admired a Japanese-style set of dishes with graduated brown earthenware exteriors and blue or celadon interiors.   We thought they'd come in handy for serving winter appetizers and hot drinks to guests, and we even agreed to get two of each color.  But the set included tea cups, rice bowls, plates, and larger bowls, and there was nowhere to put all this stuff, either in our bags or in our cabinet at home.  The owner looked slightly alarmed as C.Z. started lining up dishes all along the floor of the mart in order to choose.  In the background, Chinese pop music combined traditional erhu and a high pitched woman's voice with a bass beat.  (C.Z. informed me later that it had one note, and one only, that left the five-tone scale.)  An old man was tapping his feet to the music.  Finally, I put my foot down:  "We'll take the cups and the rice dishes.  We can always come back for the rest."  After all, tourists don't outfit their whole kitchens; they buy souvenirs!

 Our new bowls from Tongin Mart

We left laden with earthenware all wrapped up in tabloid newspapers which featured the usual starlets, but they were surrounded by Chinese writing.  We pondered several lunch options which might have proved to be a finer dining experience, but finally headed for our old standby, XO.  It had the right Chinatown feel--some of the lacquered tables and chairs were falling apart; it had a fake tree in the middle with paper hearts hanging from it (like school decorations for a July version of Valentine's Day), faded backlit photos of the entrees over the grill, and little paper flags over the bar announcing bubble teas with, "Summer!  Cool drinks!"  I quickly ordered a seafood vegetable soup in broth.  C.Z. was overwhelmed with the 60 items on the menu and was having trouble. "Rice noodles with duck.  Hmmm.  Oh.  Rice noodles with duck feet."  She finally went deer-in-the-headlights and ordered sweet and sour pork.  

Thus fortified, we found the NR train and proceeded to our second destination, the Strand bookstore near NYU. But when we surfaced in Union Square, we were surprised to find ourselves in the middle of the greenmarket!   This is the biggest farmers' market in the city, the one that Nina Planck wrote about in Real Food.  Why do I always forget what day that market is?  We couldn't buy anything refrigerated, but we bought two currant rolls, because C.Z. wants to learn to make them and so she thought she needed to sample one "critically."

The Strand Booksore (from Wikipedia Commons)

Our visit to the Strand was purely motivated by nostalgia, because of our enjoyment of Powell's and Smith Family Bookstore (which C.Z. slipped and called "Swiss Family Bookstore") with Susan's family.  Besides which, Bob's old Strand baseball cap was disreputable and the only way to cajole it away from him was to get him a new one.  

The Strand is a used and remainder bookstore, not a Barnes and Noble.  When we first moved here, it looked like something out of a Woody Allen movie.  Fans rotated in the high ceilings while nervous indoor types talked to themselves as they shuffled through the stacks.  It's had a bit of a facelift since then, and perhaps the new surroundings make the patrons look more sociable, but it's still about browsing.  C.Z. headed to the music stacks while I simply scanned for whatever looked good:  classics (one Dickens and a Sherlock Holmes sequel), cookbooks (Hot Sour Salty Sweet, a book of kitchen tips, and a Zagat marketplace guide), children's (Pinky Pye), science and architecture (no hits there).  By the time I returned, C.Z. was trying to talk herself into a book on orchestration that wasn't really the one she came for, but was by the same author.  I reminded her that we still had Patelson's ahead of us.  She shelved the book, grabbed an apron, and followed me to the checkout counter. 

 

Grace Churchyard (in warm weather)

As we walked down the street, we happened on Grace Churchyard, where C.Z. had posed with some of her friends for a Victoria Magazine shoot on the brisk November day the Airbus crashed in Queens.  I remember the day because we had friends in Rockaway and I was worried about them.  (Turns out the plane missed them by a block or two.  Still...)  All the little girls got into new Land's End school uniforms and posed as English schoolgirls with a model in five-inch heels, dressed as a teacher.  The girls were all homeschoolers.  C.Z. drew her hands up into her sweater sleeves, and they're that way in the final photo.  Afterwards we took the girls for hot chocolate, and they said they'd never model again.  Well, not until spring, anyway.  As we walked by in humid 80s weather this afternoon, C.Z. comments were still all about how cold she was that day.

By this time, we were hitting our mid-afternoon slump, but not to worry, there was an Oren's around the corner and I had a fully stamped card entitling me to a free cup of coffee.  (I'd found it in a book.)  I got something frozen, but not as fake as a frappucino, bought C.Z. an iced chocolate milk, and we sat in Washington Square Park, possibly the best place in the city for watching odd examples of humanity.  A guy with a jazz bass guitar was apparently doing a regular concert; he seemed to have an established crowd feeding his cup with dollar bills.  And he should have--he was good!  Some fellows were going from bench to bench collecting donations for a Brooklyn basketball camp, and an acrobatics class was practicing high wire near a saxophonist a little further down.  And cigarette smoke was everywhere.  A visiting high school friend of mine once posed for a photo here with an African-American Santa wearing a wedding dress and a blonde wig.  That's Washington Square Park for you.

Patelson's, on 56th St.

We found the BEF line and headed north to resurface in a totally different world--the silver towers of the upscale area near Central Park South and Carnegie Hall.  This was the part that C.Z. had been looking forward to most all day.  We were going to that New York institution of sheet music, Patelson's.  Patelson's really does look like a throwback to an earlier era.  No flashing lights, no hip hop, no iPods, just dark wooden shelves and an ancient library system for filing sheet music.  I turned C.Z. loose and sat down with Zagat's (known for its witty comments) to compare gourmet stores and bagel shops.  I knew this was going to take a while.  Finally she came back with three complete orchestral scores totaling her entire budget.  She wanted to know if I would be willing to contribute.  "Well, is there anything you can eliminate?"  I suggested.  At this point, a fellow thumbing through the scores turned and smiled, "What do you have there?" he asked kindly.  I held up Mahler's 5th and 6th Symphonies, a book of cello concertos including the well-known Dvorak one, and Mussourgsky's Night on Bald Mountain.  

"Ah, do you know who wrote that arrangement?" he asked C.Z., pointing.

"Mussourgsky?"  C.Z. replied, puzzled.

"No, Rimsky-Korsakov."  And he proceeded to relate (in a charming European accent) how several famous orchestral pieces of the era were first sketched out by Mussorgsky, but since he had a drinking problem, he didn't tend to finish them, so his friends would take his ideas and make them famous.   Something similar happened with Pictures at an Exhibition, which Ravel finished.  He told us about a recording comparing the original Mussorgsky to the Rimsky-Korsakov version, the first Bald Mountain a rough rock and the second a polished diamond.  He preferred the rock.  Later, he also mentioned that he was the conductor on the recording.  C.Z., normally not an extrovert, was rapt with attention, smiling, and looking him right in the eye.  We thanked him, and as she went to look for one more piece, he said confidentially, "Is she a fanatic?"  I swallowed hard, thinking that I really wished sometimes that she'd read more books and less sheet music.  "I was like that at her age," he continued.  Wow.  I contributed to her score fund.  Not that she's going to become a well-known conductor, but I figured maybe I should feed the interest.  

Not to worry. Right now she's sitting on my bed with a keyboard and her violin, sight-reading the violin part (and all the cello her violin will reach) of the Dvorak.