Friday, the second full day of our NYC adventure, began with the sort of intense muscle soreness that only those who live in commuter cities and don’t exercise enough can truly understand. For my part, I understand if your cup doth not run over for our plight. Stiff legs aside, we set off for Brooklyn via the bridge of the same name.
After marveling at a truly impressive feat of 19th-century engineering (seriously—they used glorified diving bells to put the supports in place under the East River, which is really hardcore), we descended into the subway system again.
After the previous day’s subway (mis)adventure, I figured I had this whole public transportation thing down. I was wrong. For reasons I still don’t understand, it was announced that our train would be skipping our intended station, which led to a sort of circling around the stop we wanted. I hope one day it will seem funny.
On the plus side, the Brooklyn Museum has some amazing stuff.
If you are able to get to Brooklyn by May 24, 2015, I highly recommend their exhibit “A New Republic,” which features the art of Kehinde Wiley. He paints portraits of African-American men and women in poses from famous paintings and sculptures from various parts of Western history. I can’t do justice to his work by trying to describe it myself, so here are some pictures of the museum’s descriptions.
The Brooklyn Museum is also home to “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago, generally considered one of the most important pieces of feminist art.
Upon our return to Manhattan, we availed ourselves of some inexpensive pizza—not the best pizza I’ve ever had, but in the moment, it was damn
We went to the World Trade Center site and visited the memorial. We also saw the nearby Irish Hunger Memorial, which commemorates the Irish Potato Famine. These deserve their own separate blog post, which I’ll get to ASAP.
Switching gears back to culinary pursuits, you owe it to yourself to get the “cereal milk” shake from Momofuku in SoHo. Just trust me on this.
After that we walked, like, a lot. All the way from Momofuku to our hotel—about twenty blocks, I think. We rested, had dinner with one of my wife’s cool artist friends, walked a whole bunch more, and called it a day. I think the endorphins and fatigue are impacting my narrative abilities.
