Last Days of Summer

Friday we got off early from work (since Monday is Labor Day) so we filled up the extra free time by having a Wii party at my place. I bought Wii Sports Resort and 3 extra MotionPlus controllers (damn you, Nintendo) so we can have proper 4-player matches. It was fun – it’s a good game to play with friends over. We finished the day with a small stroll around the neighborhood and dinner at Plaza Lounge.

I woke up pretty early on Saturday and because of that I found myself falling asleep after noon. Around 3 PM my nap was interrupted by the gentle sound of a drill-hammer right outside my window. A ConEd truck was parked in front of my building and the guys were breaking up the pavement (later I found out it was about replacing a leaking gas pipe, so I guess it’s a good thing they’re doing it). I took it as a sign to get out of the house and enjoy the rest of the day out.

My plan was to go to Central Park and do some reading, but first I took a quick detour to Chinatown for some bubble tea. There was a place I haven’t been in over a year that had some great mango tea and good, cheap food – even by local standards (there’s cheap, and then there’s Chinatown cheap). I ended up paying less than $10 for food that could have easily satisfied 2 people, plus my mango bubble tea.

The “quick” detour ended up to last about 2 hours, with me walking afterwards from Chinatown up to Union Square. There were a lot of street fairs along the way, on Spring street, Prince and a bigger one on 4th avenue. I left the latter with a corn on a cob, which for some reason reminds me of my childhood summers at my grandparent’s place.

Around 7 I finally got to the park and camped on a bench close to a cross-street. Which made for an interesting experience, since I could overhear the horse-and-carriage drivers telling NY stories to the tourists they were carrying. I learned a few things about the park’s history and some of the many movies it’s been in. I left a little after 8, since it got too dark for me to read.

Back home the ConEd workers were still there, still noisy. It looked like a good time to pay a visit to my cousin, who keeps asking me to come crash at his place in Jersey for a change (he comes to Astoria almost every weekend). So I packed some extra clothes and headed out.