Walking home

Today I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time. It was neat to feel the most famous connection between Manhattan and the borough we live in right under my feet. I was carrying Christina's laptop with me in her shoulder bag, but the extra weight wasn't too much of a nuisance. The sun was bright and it illuminated the huge stone blocks that were used to construct the thick towers that the bridge is suspended from. A horizontal placard repeated on both ends of the bridge provided a timeline of the bridge's construction.

Just before I found the entrance to the bridge, after wandering through Chinatown and Little Italy for a bit, I got dribbled by bird poo from a little chickadee or robin sitting on a telephone wire. At least it wasn't a pigeon; it's dropping was pretty miniscule and didn't cause me much anguish. I did have a hard time figuring out what to wipe my hair off with, though; I ended up using my shirt.

I'd ended up in Manhattan because I went with Christina to her office in the morning in order to take her computer home with me; she needed it to transfer a file she'd been working on onto her work computer. On the way from her office to the bridge, I walked by the UN complex, but I didn't see much going on there. Looks like they give tours, which would probably be really interesting.

In Chinatown I browsed my favorite kind of food stall, the fish market, where the goods are displayed on ice. There were several of these markets up and down Mulberry St., and all had delicious-looking fish on display. Too bad Christina doesn't eat any of this stuff; we could really throw together a feast if we could figure out how to get it back to Park Slope without thawing out too much. I had lunch at a nice Vietnamese place, where the pho was a little light on the meat and tripey goodies but made up for the shortage with really delicious broth that was infused with a whole lot of allspice or something. I don't know my spices too well, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was. And it was awfully cheap.

Once I made it back to Brooklyn across the bridge, I dropped off the computer at our apartment and walked to Target to look for a cooking pan to use while we wait for all our supplies and furniture to get here in the moving truck. I ended up going to a giant grocery store/pharmacy whose name I forget but which was just as bad as Target. I hate shopping in those places; of course, the prices are low, but the quality of the wares is really low, too, and there's no care taken in how they're displayed or in keeping up appearances. There's just junk lying all over the floors, and people are running over it in their shopping carts. And it's always horribly crowded. I much prefer small, slightly more expensive family-run stores.

I'm hoping to hear back from an employer I'd really like to work for this week. My fingers will remain crossed for the next four days.