Through hurling blizzards I drive the six hours down to Wantagh, Long Island, where I’m visiting a friend. You can tell you’re close to NYC when the drivers start tailgating you and flashing their brights before they speed off past you, whipping in and out of spaces so small you wouldn’t even want to park there. Maybe that’s why they call it the “parkway.” It’s just as blisteringly cold here as in the high peaks, but it’s nevertheless interesting – if a bit bewildering – to be in a city again. Bright lights, honking horns, smoky streets and cozy bars full of people. The suburbs of Long Island aren’t that much different from other American suburbs; you certainly forget you’re on any kind of island, until you go to the beach, and suddenly you’re standing on vast expanses of golden sand beside the ocean. Wintertime on Long Island beaches is exquisite. My companion tells me that while the summer months see nothing but bronzing bodies, screaming children, beer cans, stereos, and small mountains of trash, the winter ones (as I can certainly see) are practically empty. It’s bitterly cold, yes; the wind blows up from the ocean and the clouds are darkest gray and the snow and ice covers the wooden boardwalk at Jones Beach, but the gorgeous combination of sparkling snow and pale brown sand, churned up together by the one line of footprints, is something worth writing home about. The waves come up and wash the snow away just at the edge; other than that, and the sand beneath our jogging feet, you would hardly know what lies beneath that wide white blanket.
I drain my bank account on public transportation, traveling back and forth on the Long Island Railroad between Wantagh and Penn Station, since I’ve got another friend to stay with who’s recently moved to a snazzy apartment in Midtown. The first night in Manhattan was a blast. We went hungry as wolves to La Esquina, a Mexican café and tequila bar in the general vicinity of SoHo, and gorged ourselves first on coronas and quesadillas, next on silky, expensive tequilas served in tall shot glasses with a tall shot of spicy tomato juice beside. It is the closest I’ve come to the tequila bars in Mexico. The décor is fabulous – chic, yet comfortable, and sort of spooky, with mountains of melting candlewax and deep mahogany wood everywhere. We drink as far as our budgets allow and a little beyond, then head off into the night to another lounge bar, and another, until we’re at a place renowned for its celebrities, crawling with security guards and barricaded with checkpoints, and by this time I’m exhausted and broke and a tiny bit miserable – I feel like a country mouse in the city, getting pulled about in the bright lights, dining on too much rich food and living in a constant state of low-grade fear. It’s a bit strange… just the contrast, I guess, between mountain silence and the gaudy, greedy blare of the Big Apple. Still, I give the place a few more days. Since it’s December, I hike over to the cold and colorful Rockefeller Center, sip a Dean & Deluca hot chocolate, and watch the familes tumbling over one another in that famed ice rink. I go out with my Midtown buddy to a new restaurant in the Lower East Side called High Chai – a combination of bar, restaurant, and teahouse that’s beautifully decorated, if a bit cold, with interesting tea-related items on the menu such as raspberry tea-crusted chicken breast or Asian fusion goodies such as dim sum dumplings that taste more like pesto ravioli. Delicious, if a bit odd. |
