College Friends in New York
Oct. 21st, 2018 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
child_of_the_airI'm on Amtrak back from a quick weekend visit to New York, and I want to jot down at least a few quick memories of the trip while they're fresh in my memory. It was a short trip--I arrived at Penn Station on Friday around 1:30pm and left for home from Penn Station on Sunday around 6:00pm--but it was still a wonderful trip, and well worth my decision to cancel my tutoring clients for the weekend.
The trip happened largely as a reunion of Tesseract: the strange little social group focused on an off-campus apartment that formed during my senior year at Caltech. One of my closest college friends, who I hadn't seen in five-and-a-half years because she lives in England, was in the City for a conference, and I and a number of other Tesseract people traveled in to get to see her and each other.
We spent Friday wandering around the West Village and chatting, eating apricot tarts from what seems to be my go-to French bakery in New York, Patisserie Claude, browsing book shops including Unoppressive, Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, and catching up. On Saturday, I got a lot of sleep, which I really needed, and didn't leave Sunset Park, where I was staying, at all. That evening, we had a wonderful party to preview one of my Tesseract friends' "Dance Your PhD Thesis" video. I cooked a bunch of Polish food and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. Plus, I successfully introduced a New York Twitter friend to some of my other New York friends, and they got along wonderfully.
Sunday, though, was in some weird way, likely the best day. On Saturday night, several of us stayed up until nearly four in the morning talking and catching up, so we ended up crashing at the apartment of the friend who was hosting the party in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We didn't manage to get up until almost eleven in the morning, but we did eventually get up, and were joined by a MIT friend who now does urban planning work in New York for breakfast at a very good Mexican restaurant down the street. My English friend was particularly excited, because she says it's impossible to get good Latin American food anywhere in Europe. (We all went to college in Los Angeles, which I suppose gives us some opinions on Mexican food.)
On our way back from breakfast, we ran across a parade--I'm not sure exactly what, though there were floats with flags from a number of Latin American nations--and I was reminded how much I love Sunset Park. It seems to be exactly what I imagine New York should be: a very dense mix of immigrants from basically everywhere, with all the stores open 24/7, and almost everything one might need within a few blocks. We then saw a bunch more of Brooklyn due to a series of Lyft rides to the places other people were staying, since they hadn't intended to spend the night, and finally my English friend who I hadn't seen in five years and another close, mutual friend went on a walk from the 9/11 Memorial in Downtown Manhattan to Penn Station, where I caught my train back to DC. I'm a bit sad I didn't get to go to Mass with them afterward: one of them is Catholic, so they went to Mass at a church a half-block from Penn Station.
The trip happened largely as a reunion of Tesseract: the strange little social group focused on an off-campus apartment that formed during my senior year at Caltech. One of my closest college friends, who I hadn't seen in five-and-a-half years because she lives in England, was in the City for a conference, and I and a number of other Tesseract people traveled in to get to see her and each other.
We spent Friday wandering around the West Village and chatting, eating apricot tarts from what seems to be my go-to French bakery in New York, Patisserie Claude, browsing book shops including Unoppressive, Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, and catching up. On Saturday, I got a lot of sleep, which I really needed, and didn't leave Sunset Park, where I was staying, at all. That evening, we had a wonderful party to preview one of my Tesseract friends' "Dance Your PhD Thesis" video. I cooked a bunch of Polish food and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. Plus, I successfully introduced a New York Twitter friend to some of my other New York friends, and they got along wonderfully.
Sunday, though, was in some weird way, likely the best day. On Saturday night, several of us stayed up until nearly four in the morning talking and catching up, so we ended up crashing at the apartment of the friend who was hosting the party in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We didn't manage to get up until almost eleven in the morning, but we did eventually get up, and were joined by a MIT friend who now does urban planning work in New York for breakfast at a very good Mexican restaurant down the street. My English friend was particularly excited, because she says it's impossible to get good Latin American food anywhere in Europe. (We all went to college in Los Angeles, which I suppose gives us some opinions on Mexican food.)
On our way back from breakfast, we ran across a parade--I'm not sure exactly what, though there were floats with flags from a number of Latin American nations--and I was reminded how much I love Sunset Park. It seems to be exactly what I imagine New York should be: a very dense mix of immigrants from basically everywhere, with all the stores open 24/7, and almost everything one might need within a few blocks. We then saw a bunch more of Brooklyn due to a series of Lyft rides to the places other people were staying, since they hadn't intended to spend the night, and finally my English friend who I hadn't seen in five years and another close, mutual friend went on a walk from the 9/11 Memorial in Downtown Manhattan to Penn Station, where I caught my train back to DC. I'm a bit sad I didn't get to go to Mass with them afterward: one of them is Catholic, so they went to Mass at a church a half-block from Penn Station.
