Greetings from Yonkers! I'm having a fabulous time with my friends Nellorat, Womzilla and Supergee up here. We met for dinner at Ollie's Noodle Shop, a Chinese restaurant right near Times Square. On the way there Georg and I discovered that the Staten Island Ferry terminal has been rebuilt and is much nicer. Actually for the last couple of years it had been under construction & was really atrociously awful, but it was no great shakes before that either. Now it's all shiny new and sort of deco. And on the floor there's a mosaic depicting the harbor with Ellis Island, Governor's Island, and a dotted line showing the ferry's course.
We also discovered that in New York people will talk about your tattoo within hearing, but they will not touch you without invitation. For some reason in North Carolina lots of people feel free to grab and/or touch my back, without asking and sometimes without even announcing themselves first. But this is the city of "back the fuck off." I did catch some guy looking down my dress on the subway, but I just crossed my arm across my chest until he moved away.
Dinner was fantastic: we shared dumplings with chili oil, szechuan noodles, roast duck, broccoli with garlic sauce, shitake mushrooms and pea shoots -- which were the stem and curly-cue shoots, very yummy -- and roast pork with noodles. Every dish was excellent and I haven't had Chinese food in a long time, so it was really nice to do that.
(Speaking of which, I've been meaning to post about that roast pork in Chinese restaurants, the kind that's red on the edges. Because we made it at home recently. Except we didn't use the red food coloring. The marinade is mostly hoisin and spices, and you have to put water in a roasting pan and put the meat on a wire rack over the water. So it roasts and steams at the same time. It turned out really really good. The recipe is called "char siu" and I realized in the middle of making it that I already knew that word. See, in high school I waitressed at a Chinese restaurant. I got the job because I was learning Chinese, but I was studying Mandarin and everyone at the restaurant spoke Cantonese. So there was no opportunity for me to practice Mandarin, but I did learn some food words in Cantonese. The most common takeout order at the restaurant was (imagine shouting at the top of your lungs in a noisy kitchen) CHAR siu DIN-gay! Sai-ge HA chau fan! Which means "egg rolls and small shrimp fried rice." I always thought char siu meant "one order" and din-gay meant "egg roll," but if char siu means "roast pork" then it must have meant "pork egg rolls." I knew what sai-ge ha chau fan meant, that was pretty close to the same words in Mandarin.
But I digress.)
After dinner we went down to a subway station at 23rd street that has cool tile mosaics of hats on the walls. Each hat has a little label below it naming a famous person, so we speculate that the mosaics depicted hats actually worn by those people. And the hats were at different heights on the wall which may have been the height of the original wearer. Pretty cool.
After that Georg needed to get back to Staten Island, so the rest of us headed up to Yonkers. Where I got a tour of the house, which I hadn't seen in about 10 years and is looking really good. They have an amazing amount of stuff which is remarkably well organized. I also got to meet their 14 pet rats. Who are exceedingly cute. They're just like big mice, or like guinea pigs with tails. They like to crawl up and down your clothes, and one of them even crawled into the sleeve of my dress! Their claws didn't hurt but did seem to irritate my skin: I was itchy and red where they had walked on bare skin. Nellorat said the same thing happens to her. The rats are in various cages all around the house, according to their complex social hierarchy. There are 3 in the guest room with me: Wilbur, Franklin and ... Orville? No offense, third rat, I forgot your name. They make a little bit of noise but it doesn't bother me. I had guinea pigs in my room when I was young so the sound of rodents moving about a cage during the night isn't unknown to me.
Tomorrow we had planned to go to the Bronx Zoo, but may not make it due to the predicted insanely hot weather. We may go a little later in the day when it's cooled off a bit. We shall see!
Egad. People just walk up and GRAB you without warning? Anyone who does that to me is just begging to be flattened -- not out of hostility, but because I'm likely to take that as an attack and respond with a fast WHACK, elbow to chest or spin-and-swipe as appropriate.
I've often recommended that pregnant women should carry an old-fashioned ruler at all times, for smacking the hands of strangers who feel free to walk up and pat their bellies. It's just one more aspect of the "women aren't really people, especially if they're pregnant" thing.