New York City is too wonderful a place not to explore, so we have been taking family outings to different neighborhoods. Things don’t always go as planned, but that, as it turns out, is the fun.
A few weeks back, we got up to Harlem in plenty of time to hit Sylvia’s early for gospel brunch. I heard it got crowded, but when I walked in at 10 am and saw it was empty, I realized we had been a bit over-zealous. The music didn’t start for nearly two hours.
The temperature was in the teens, and wandering by foot didn’t seem particularly fun, but we drove across 125th Street, saw the Apollo and other landmarks, then decided on a whim to visit our old neighborhood of Morningside Heights, near Columbia University. The kids grumbled until we stopped by Morningside Park and they were pulled in by the views and the tromp down the stairs into the depths. It was beautiful, another world. We didn’t stay long, but the drive past Columbia and its campus, where Big G went to school, was, in and of itself, an experience, as was stopping at Samad’s, my favorite Middle Eastern market.
Sylvia’s turned out to be very touristy, with the singer mostly asking people to shout out the exotic locales from where they hailed. But the number of foreign countries represented was fascinating. The fried chicken was delicious and the day had been fun.
The next week, when we decided to hit Manhattan’s Chinatown for dim sum, everyone was game.
We saw the barricades right when we got off the train. It had been the Chinese New Year.
“The parade was the other day,” G said, sounding somehow sure.
But as we neared The Golden Unicorn, our fave dim sum spot, it was clear we had picked the wrong day. It was the parade day, and parade-goers crowded around, making the line at least an hour long.
We just had to wander. And so we did, through the many winding streets of Chinatown. The kids picked up small boxes of little firecrackers along the way to “ward off bad luck,” according to Chinese tradition, and so didn’t mind so much that we could find no dim sum. We ended up at Bassanova Ramen (not exactly Chinese, but delicious), and the kids’ disappointment was assuaged when they got to buy confetti cannons and shoot them into the air over the parade, which went by right outside with its brilliant red costumes and its dancing dragons.
The throngs of mostly Chinese people gave a sense of what it might be like to visit China, to be a distinct minority, out of our element. But we loved it, so much that our inability to cross the parade route to reach our subway stop, an interesting adventure that took at least 45 minutes, didn’t even upset us.
How to top that? We tried a couple weeks later to get to the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side for a 3D printing exhibit. It was snowy and cold, and all the trains seemed to be malfunctioning. We got off at Jay Street in Brooklyn when they said the A would be stuck for a while, and we went outside to search for a cab or a bus, or maybe even we would walk across the bridge to complete our mission.
Then we switched gears. It was getting late, how ’bout something closer? We started walking, seeing the grand government buildings of Downtown, where the kids had never really been, and we decided on Brooklyn Heights for lunch.
“Sorry guys,” I said, as we tried to find a place.
“What do you mean?” Eli asked, his face scrunched in confusion. “We like getting lost. It’s the best part.”
Oscar nodded and grabbed my phone.
“Let’s ask Siri where to go,” he said, and in a moment the robot voice found us Dellarocco’s brick-oven pizza, which we enjoyed thoroughly, as if it had been the plan all along.
