Around New York with My Friends - Saturday 12/6/2008

My Beinu friends and I were on the go again, this time exploring Harlem and Upper West Side of Upper Manhattan in one day.

Around New York

The Cloisters, A branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Devoted to art of medieval Europe)
Fort Tryon Park
(Special Tour: The Christmas Story)

The museum was built in the 1930s with the generous endowment from the philanthropist John D. Rockfeller Jr. The “Cloister” is like a Chinese courtyard surrounded by art galleries (Chinese living quarters). The works of art cover chronological periods from AD 1000 to 1500 – the Romanesque period, the Gothic era, Medieval art.

We came initially to admire the magnificent museum architecture and attend a special “Christmas Story” guided tour.

I am no expert in European art; but I must say that, an excellent guide would make a world of differences for neophytes like us. We were lucky to have an extraordinarily animated, funny, and knowledgeable lady volunteer as our guide. Watching her telling the intricacies of Western religious/Christmas/nativity stories and the art spawning from them was like watching a one-woman performance, immeasurably enlightening and entertaining. I have gained a heightened appreciation of the Christianity faith and the European religious art and as a result.

Admission: $10 (We used a friend’s museum membership ID to obtain a discount)
Friends: Agnes Young, Kathy Ding, Susie

Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
(This magnificent cathedral was burned down in 2001, and painstakingly restored to its finest form today.)

St. John Cathedral is one of the greatest urban cathedrals that blend great medieval Europe with modern New York traditions. After the fire, it took 8 years to clean and restore the architecture, stained glass, stone and wood carvings to their previous grandeur.

It wasn’t just the holy feeling walking through the restored church. It was actually a happy experience - There were public performances of edgy music and story-telling going on when we were there. We heard the fascinating stories of modern artist angst told by a poet named Master Lee, a long-hair, bearded, middle-aged man of Chinese descent in tuxedo. He was whimsical, philosophical, and occasionally even profane in his story-telling. I remembered him questioning about “out of the box” (What’s wrong with ‘in the box’? We live in the box – our houses, we die in the box – look around the church, it’s full of the tombs of deceased abbies. The box containers today enable the global trade, etc…)

Admission: Free
Friends: Agnes Young, Kathy Ding, Shan Lo, Susie

Saigon Grill – Vietnamese Cooking
620 Amsterdam (corner of cross street 90th)

I suggested this place on account of an old colleague’s recommendation, and my Chinese friends quite liked it. We didn’t know what we were ordering. So we asked the waiter to order for us.

And we ended up liking almost all what we’ve ordered, especially the Sate Vietnamese rice noodle dish, the shrimp summer rolls, and the Sate chicken dish. The price was also very reasonable. This restaurant is definitely our favorite West Side story.

Lunch for 4: $60 (4 dishes and soup)
Friends: Agnes Young, Kathy Ding, Shan Lo, Susie

(PS: We had coffee after dinner at, guess what, one of the Dunkin Donuts shops. Agnes and I both realized how Dunking Donuts meant so much to us, because both of our kids loved the Dunking donuts when they were little…now they are all grown up. This place brought back the unique memories of us as young mothers and our babies together…)


Susie
12/7/2008

One Week of San Francisco 11/9-11/14/2008

Sunday 11/9/2008 – Weather was fantastic, a sunny and brilliant fall day. I met with my Beinu friends and my daughter – Kristin, Grace, Koren and Yamei – in a famous restaurant in Chinatown, R & G Lounge, for lunch. We then took a long walk through Fisherman’s Warf, while stopping at Peet’s Coffee for a relaxed cup of coffee. We ran into one disturbed, disruptive person, loud and unruly, at a Safeway store. My daughter told me, “In SF, you’ll get a lot of this type of crazies. Usually they don’t do harm if you don’t provoke them. In New York, you can get into big trouble with similar type of people.”

Monday 11/10/2008 – My husband Steve and I went to Berkeley, checking out our old haunts (we lived nearby for one year in 1980). Not much was changed. We toured the Spral Plaza famous for the political rallies and riots in the 60s, then went on to Albany where we rented a place on the street of Ordway (We never located the house – they all looked the same.) “Walker’s Pie Shop” on Solano Avenue where old people liked to congregate and socialize back in those days, where one could get a decent size of meal and pie for a fair price, is no more. We then strolled down to Vivarian the snake aquarium, and browsed the REI where we used to do a lot.

Tuesday 11/11/2008 – Veteran’s Day and Kristin had a day off from her paralegal work. Steve, Kristin and I first went to the DeYoung Museum, but it was too crowded. So we turned around and went to the Asian Art Museum instead where they had an early Afghanistan art exhibit, mostly gold pieces from the period when Alexander the Greek occupied northern Afghanistan. Afterwards, we toured around the Japan Center which seemed a bit quieter than I’ve remembered. At night, we met with my sister-in-law and niece at an Indian restaurant, the Rotee, near Kristin’s apartment on Pierce Street (in the Haight-Asbury neighborhood). San Francisco is a beautiful city distinct with its colorful and varied Victorian or Edwardian architecture, much prettier than New York City. It also seems to be friendlier and easier for young people like Kristin to start out, except the rent is quite high for her.

Wednesday 11/12/2008 – I took the day off resting at my in-laws’, only went out at night to meet Steve’s high-school buddy Tom in Berkeley. Tom works for a prestigious architectural firm in SF for over 30 years.

Thursday 11/13/2008 – Steve went with another of his high-school friends, David Gowen, for a strenuous hike. I went by myself to explore Oakland Chinatown on account of Kristin’s recommendation (She thought Oakland Chinatown is a bit more “authentic”, less “touristy” than San Francisco Chinatown.) Indeed, I was able to take care of my mundane Chinese business quite well there: I ate a hearty Vietnamese meal; bought a pair of utterly comfortable walking shoes; picked up some nice jade pieces for my new craft projects,; finally visited the popular Asian community library sampling the large selection of Asian and Taiwanese magazines. I came back and met with David, Steve’s friend, who was quite an amazing individual in his own right: an autodidact who never went to college, but has a great love for nature and is becoming an well-known expert on Bay Area plants, publishing articles in respected journal and all that.

Friday 11/14/2008 – Steve and I went to visit the San Francisco Aquarium. Steve didn’t like it as much as the old one before all the remodeling fanfare (He thought, in an effort to make the aquarium environment feeling “more natural”, the new aquarium was becoming less friendly to the visitors – It was hard to see the creatures, and hard to move around exhibits.) I was happy nonetheless - I got to see the weirdest creature I’ve ever seen in my life: the leaf sea dragon. After the aquarium, we drove to Sausalito for a quick tour, again, not much change there – same old, same old!

Saturday 11/15/2008 – This concluded my 1-week vacation to San Francisco. Susie