NYC revisited

Monday was not our day. Our long-planned Staten Island tour was a no-show. We had left the house early to get to the southern tip of Manhattan and catch the ferry to Staten Island. But, nobody showed up for the promised half-day tour and the office of "The Wheel" - a humongous project including a huge Ferris Wheel and a shopping/entertainment complex - was closed. We have heard about problems with the contractor there, but not quite sure yet what's going on.

Well, we did a lot of other things instead, e.g., we walked The Highline again - a green promenade on the elevated tracks of a former railroad, with artwork, fantastic architecture, stages and benches and plants grew immensely – and inspected the crazy-growing, booming Hudson Yards area, a railroad hub. Wondering, who can afford all the apartments coming up there... Chinese? Arabs? In any case, not your regular New Yorker!

On Monday evening, we took the subway to our previous long-time "home from home", to the Strange Dog Inn in Brooklyn's Midwood section, and had dinner with our friends Paula & Gail & BB (Benny, a huge Australian Shepherd), with Dom and the two cats.

Chinatown (picture on the left), the Lower East Side, the Bowery and the Broadway (probably the best area to go shopping) - even these neighborhoods are progressively changing, old shops and restaurants substituted by modern chain stores.

The old Essex Street Market, a city market hall from the 1940ies will soon move to a newly built highrise, the LES shows almost no Jewish or German reminiscense anymore, with the exception of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (pic below, left), the Broadway gets more and more chain stores (besides the old souvenir vendors like the one on the pic above), just Chinatown didn't change that much. Around the famous Flatiron Building (pic below, right) a new neighborhood, "NoMad", is up & coming, things are definitely changing.

Oct. 31 was Halloween and besides the big parade in the evening - which we missed because of a hockey game (Rangers : Las Vegas) in the Madison Square Garden – there was a kids' parade going on in the afternoon on Washington Square, where at the same time one of a series of artworks of Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei – "Good Fences make Good Neighbors" – was installed in the arch. We spent some time in the sun and watched the kids in their elaborate costumes, while at the same time, about 1,5 mi. away, a crazy truck driver murdered 8 people on the promenade along the Hudson River. We heard the sirens and saw the police cars and ambulances without knowing first what's going on.

Before the hockey game we spent part of the evening with our friends in a new Indian Restaurant called "aRoqa" in Chelsea and the food was terrific! Spicy, but not over-spiced, each dish very different in taste, from crabcake to duck and vegetarian dishes. Cocktails from the bar (pic) were fantastic, too.

Also, we went shopping - though, not excessively: Bought a bag full of books at Strand's, our favorite bookstore with new AND used books, and some clothing at Uniqlo (pic), a Japanese department store, which we like. Also, we stopped for another visit at Union Square Market - the presentation as well as the variety of goods is just amazing.