Brooklyn Bound

We began the day by heading over to Brooklyn to visit Erin and see the neighborhood that she lives in – Greenpoint. It’s right on the other side of the East River and is easily accessible from Manhattan via the L train.

Her apartment is very nice and in the middle of a legitimately Polish-American neighborhood. It’s an interesting cultural island in that everything – from shop signs to window advertisements to local newspapers – is literally in Polish. Given the Polish heritage on my mom’s father’s side of the family, it was a very interesting place to visit. And if you need dried sausages, pickles or any type of Polish cuisine / ingredients, this is apparently the place to go.

Here are a couple of churches near Erin's apartment...















For lunch we ate at a small French restaurant that just opened up. In fact, it was so new that there were no menus and you had to consult the chalkboard that rested against the wall. What the restaurant lacked in terms of heritage, it made up for in terms of quality. I went with an omelet, my mom got the croque monsieur and Erin got the moules frites. My mom and Erin also got ice tea that was blended on-site and they loved it.

After lunch we were walking down the street that the restaurant is on and all of a sudden a guy started yelling at us. Literally yelling…in a New York accent thicker than any I’d ever heard in my years living in NYC. We initially had no clue that he was even yelling at us, but finally it became obvious. Not that this explained exactly why he was yelling at us.

As it turned out, there was a semi truck that had tried to turn too sharply on a corner and had hit a light post with its trailer. The light post was leaning against a wall in the direction that we were walking and the guy apparently felt that yelling at us irately (DO YOU GUYS WANT TO GET KILLED OR SOMETHING?!?!?!?!?) was the best way to get our attention so that we wouldn’t walk under the fallen post. Thanks buddy. A simple head’s up would have been sufficient since none of us were in imminent danger…

After our confrontational welcome to Brooklyn and in an effort to calm the nerves a bit, we decided to walk to a park along the East River that had views of the Manhattan skyline. It was very nice as can be seen from the pictures below. I definitely couldn’t complain about the weather – it was much nicer than the cold and damp clime that I had left in Switzerland.










After a return trip to Erin’s apartment for some water and a little time off our feet, we walked around some more so my mom could pick up local gifts for her friends. We then headed back to Manhattan and grabbed an afternoon drink at a Swedish restaurant in the West Village in order to cool down.

For dinner my mom, Erin and I met up with my cousins Christian and Rick, as well as Rick’s husband Serge. They made the trip from San Francisco and Montreal, respectively, and are joining for Erin’s grad-related celebrations. We ate at a tapas restaurant called Café Ronda on the UWS not far from my old apartment and it was a lot of fun catching up with everyone. And Rick could sympathize with respect to my frustrations over learning the French language -- he went through the same experience when he first moved to Montreal. But now he's fluent, so there is hope for me too...