NYC, DAY 2

I slept in. Dave woke me up at 10:00 a.m. (!!!) While he went out for coffee (there is no coffee maker in the room and only limited coffee service downstairs), I took a shower and got ready to start our day.

We had planned to be at the Whitney Museum when it opened at 10:30, but that was not happening obviously. Instead, we decided to get there by noon, have lunch at the restaurant in the museum and then join the 1:00 tour of the David Wojnarowitz exhibit. 

We walked out to Broadway and then caught a cab to the museum. I'm all about a taxi on this visit. I even resent having to walk to the corner to catch one. I'd prefer it if they could pull up to the door of our room on the 8th floor.

And speaking of our room on the 8th floor: The bellhop did that corny thing that they all do in the movies, where they put your two rinky dink suitcases on one of those giant luggage gondolas and show you to your room and then show you around the room. But this is New York and we are not rich, so our room is the size of shoe box for a pair of children's shoes, the tour consisted of his showing us the switches near the door and the closet (also near the door) and then hightailing it out of there with a sympathy tip. I don't resent bellhops who do that sort of thing, actually, and I have a view of tipping that is part having been a waitress and part Hemingway in (I think) A Movable Feast writing that the easiest way to make friends in Paris is to tip big and keep tipping until everyone is your friend (or at least pretending to be, which is pretty much the same thing when you're traveling). Anyway, our bellhop, "Bob" (which I don't believe for a second is his real name because, although he claims to have been born and raised in Queens, my ears tell me it is  more likely Queens by way of Moscow) was friendly and he even made a joke (that I heard him repeat to another couple checking in to a room on our floor) about the view: "That's the view of the beach."

This is the view he was talking about:

Look at that fire escape on the building in the middle distance. If that were my only route out of a fire, I'd take it, yes, but only after weighing my chances with the fire.

So where was I?

In a cab going to the Meatpacking District, right? Dave and I bought tickets, had lunch in the café: a tiny tomato salad, a small green salad, a burger, and four pieces of zucchini tempura for $82. Welcome to Manhattan!

Then went up to join the Wojnarowicz tour--which was cancelled 10 minutes after it was supposed to start.

I looked at a half dozen works by Wojnarowicz on my own but then found myself getting overwhelmed. Wojnarowicz was an artist on the forefront of the AIDS epidemic in New York City and used to wear a jacket emblazoned with the sentiment, "If I die of AIDS, forget burial, just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A." His art is unrelenting and threatened to pull me under so I had to make the decision to let myself move away from it.

Instead, I went and looked at work from Latinex artists. Their work was also challenging (dealing with issues of immigration, for example, and concepts of ritualized cruelty in ancient Latin American cultures), but it was more conceptual and less about raw rage.


Anyway, Wojnarowicz's work is important and you should look at it if you can. (But sometimes you just have to accept that you can't.)

My eyes usually fill up after about 90 minutes and then they need a rest, so when that happened, we went and sat in the cafe on the 4th floor and had a coffee. Then we went back to it, making our way through the other floors, through paintings and drawings and such.

There was one woman, Mary Corse, who played with light in a unique way, working with white plains and electricity and the pigments used by the highway department to make the stripes in the road glow white when lights hit them. If you're not into contemporary art or conceptual art, this is the kind of thing that you should give a miss. I mean, this is one of her paintings:

 But I find it to be very intriguing stuff. I really liked the paintings she did as she started to branch out and add black to her paintings. They are layered with black reflective material so they sparkle like stars in the night sky as you walk past them.

When we were finished looking at that stuff, The Brain was ready for some distraction from the business of looking at art. Dave and I talked about what to do and finally settled on walking a few blocks worth of the High Line, the old elevated railway turned park that we first encountered just after they had opened the first section about eight years ago.

The whole park is open now, and it runs along the west side of Manhattan, picking up just steps from the door of the Whitney and wending its way along for almost a mile and a half. We probably walked about a third of it, up to around 17th street (maybe 20th?) before bailing. Along the way, we had a watermelon paleta from the La Newyorkina cart and we sat in one of my favorite spots in New York:

It's a little seated area with a huge window that overlooks one the streets.

That's it. That's all it is and I could sit there and watch that street for hours.

I took that picture looking back at where we had been sitting, in the center window (the one with the red reflection in the center).

After a bit, we dropped off the High Line and took a taxi back to the hotel. After a breather, we talked about dinner and finally decided on a Cuban-Chinese restaurant called Calle Dao in our neighborhood. We called ahead and reserved a table (which was easy because we were eating at, like 6:30, which is super early for a big city dinner) and walked over to the place. On the way, we passed a Chinese restaurant with this appealing street board out front:

But curiously enough, we continued to our destination.

The hostess who greeted us was a gorgeous young Asian woman as re-imagined by a Latin culture. She had stuffed her Latina-level junk in the trunk into a leather mini skirt and her makeup bordered on cholita (only with fake eyelashes for days). But she was super sweet, which is always a good thing in a hostess.

For our dinner, we ordered tiger salad (cucumber, coriander, scallions, watercress, baby kale, sesame, crispy shallots, and sesame dressing) and a shared order of yucca fries with sour orange mojo and gochujang ketchup. For our main courses, I ordered chicken and yellow rice (roast chicken over a kind of arroz amarillo made into fried rice with chorizo) and Dave ordered lechon asado (braised Cuban pork with plum onion escabeche over fried rice). Dave’s entree turned out to be a mountain of pork on a mountain of rice. Luckily, he’s on a vacation from vegetarianism and, with my help, was able to polish off nearly the entire dish. It was quite tasty. Who (besides the communists, of course) would have guessed that the fusion of Cuban and Chinese would yield such amazing results?

We rolled back to our room at the hotel in a food daze.