You Nork

Alan had a meeting in NYC last week for a grant he got through Chamber Music of America (very cool. More on that later.) We used it as an excuse to spend 2 1/2 days visiting Josh & Laura and exploring the Big Apple kid-style.

We love visiting Josh & Laura. If they had a blog I would read it every day, just to see what they are cooking. They get a lot of food out of a local organic grocery's dumpster, tossed just as it reaches its expiration date. They also grow food in buckets in their apartment building's tiny back garden. They drink out of jars, & if you compliment Laura on a piece of clothing, she's likely to laugh and say, "Would you believe I found this on the STREET?!?"

Speaking of streets, our girls walked MILES of city streets last week. They were troopers! Alan researched two amazing playgrounds and a putt putt right on the Hudson River. We revisited "The High Line," a city park created out of an abandoned, raised railroad track. We rode a few city blocks in a cab--a tiny TV screen on the back of the seat in front of us was, of course, a total hit.

While Alan headed to hear some live jazz, I had the splendid idea of taking the girls to see Times Square. I wanted to see their eyes pop like the scene in "Enchanted" when Giselle emerges from the manhole into the city for the first time. Reality was a little different. It was pouring rain. We couldn't even get out of the subway--all the tourists were standing packed like cattle on the stairs. Once on the drizzly street, Amelia had to pee, and we walked to the police station to find that the only accessible restroom was McDonald's. Have you ever been to the McDonald's in Times Square? It's something out of a dark, futuristic movie. Seating runs along dark, brick corridors, where patrons sit on individual bar stools facing wall-mounted TV screens you swipe credit cards to watch. Fortunately, it was so packed and dark no one noticed that we peed w/out patronizing.

So we bought some street vendor soft pretzels and headed back to Josh & Laura's, where they crashed on the floor in about 2 minutes' time. However, it was still fun. And memorable. And we would do it again in a heart beat. Well, maybe not the Times Square in the rain part.