Monday, July 11, 2005

Best Pair of Enormous Walks

Saturday morning I woke up with the desire to walk. A lot. So I did. From my house I walked over to 8th Avenue, then up to 23rd street, east on 23rd to Park, down Park to Broadway, down Broadway to 4th street, across 4th street to Lafayette, down Lafayette to Grand (or was it Broome?), along that street to Mercer, up Mercer to Prince, west on Prince to 6th Avenue, up 6th Avenue to Bedford, west on Bedford to 7th, down to Leroy, along Leroy to Greenwich street, up Greenwich to 11th, along 11th to 6th, then up to 12th and back home again. It was like 4 hours.

During the Chelsea portion of my walk I examined one of the best Neck Faces in town up close. While simple, this one takes the cake.

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Maybe you've heard, there's a 7-11 in the city now, at Park and 23rd. Visiting it was one of the purposes of my walk. You'll never know how much you love 7-11 until you live somewhere without 7-11s and then suddenly get to have a 7-11 again. Did I get a Slurpee? Of course. Did I get a Go-Go Taquito? Unfortunately.

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Like I've said before, I'm just not feeling as clicky as I used to with the camera, so I hardly took any pictures on my hike. But I did take a picture of this driveway, make sure not to block it, because someone might need to drive that car soon.

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Things of note about my afternoon walk: I went to a comic book store. It was sunny and beautiful almost all of the time, but it rained like crazy for about 30 minutes. I was one of the only people on the street who had an umbrella on them, you see, I've gotten into the habit of checking the weather before going out because I'm learning you just can't trust New York. In Soho I saw Willem Dafoe walking down the street with arms all around a curly-haired girl wearing huge sunglasses. In the West Village I noticed a nice, big public pool I didn't know existed before and admired it (and smelled the sweet chlorine) for a while. And on Greenwich I passed Maggie Gyllenhaal walking down the street. She was smiling and laughing as she talked on her hands-free and for a few seconds it seemed maybe she was smiling and laughing at/with me. Not this time.

In the evening I accepted an offer from Karisa to meet up with her and Josh and two friends of Josh's to walk across the bridge and eat at Grimaldi's. I took the wrong subway down and found myself battling with downtown downtown to find the bridge.

Nearing the bridge, I wound up in the park in front of City Hall. I didn't know it was like New Orleans in there. And I say it was like New Orleans because it reminded me of Pirates of the Caribbean, if you follow me.

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In the park there were lit-up pictures by the guy who did the cover for the Best of Blur album. My no-flash shots turned out awful, so here they are, totally flashed-out.

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There were little buildings in the park.

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Like I said, little buildings.

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And big buildings outside of the park.

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So we all met up (even Patricia), walked across the bridge, waited for pizza, ate pizza (totally not pictured), and then hung out down by the bridge for a bit.

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Like I said, the bridge.

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The people at the River Cafe were all singing "You're Just Too Good to Be True," and if that's not really the name of the song, I hope you know what song I'm talking about.

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And over there is Manhattan.

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Of all the pictures I took this day, for some reason I like this picture of the ground the most.

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I tried my best to take a great picture of Patricia to make her more famous.

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And here's my one bit of photographic evidence that I was out with a group of people. Like I said, not very clicky these days.

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You know how I am, won over by simple graffiti from time to time.

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8 comments:

M said...

just FYI, 7-11s having it's grand opening today. they had a news crew there this morning, along with a man in a slurpee costume and people handing out free muffins and coupons for free slurpees.

Anonymous said...

I went there earlier last week: they have this delicious blue berry slurpee which contains Fanta grape soda (arguably the finest grape soda available).

Side of Jeffrey said...

My comment is not about 7-11, rather, about the pool. Was this the one on Houston (the rec center large pool) or the small above ground pool by Jenna and Karisa's pad? If its the one by their house, please note you must take a child with you or you can't swim. I tried to get my 4'10'' Chinese coworker Christine to go with me because she is childlike, but she kicked me. Does anyone have a nephew I can borrow for an afternoon?

Anonymous said...

That picture of the fountain looks like Darth Vader.

Anonymous said...

7-11 is one of the only things i missed when i moved here. for real. here is a story. when we were kids we could be a little bit of a handful, esp. in the summers. we had this big house and this huge yard and were really imaginitive in our uses of it. and my mum was pretty good at figuring things to keep us busy. anyway, this one day she called us all together and said if you stop trying to make mud puddles/chasing your brother with naked barbies/spraying each other with the hose/practicing tennis against the house or whatever else we were doing, i have the best surprise for you. and we were all "what mummy what?" and she got all mysterious and said "we will go to funville." and mouths agape and minds spinning at the fabulousness of anything called Funville, we settled down.

so she gets us in the car, drives to main street marshfield, and stops at KwikMart, Marshfield's answer to 7-11. That was Funville. And we could get anything at all we wanted. This is the genius of my mother. She made this totally ghetto pseudo-7-11 into some sort of magical fun place for her 4 kids. Dude, i would come home from college and want to go to "funville."

Anonymous said...

I've missed 7-11 too, and Dairy Queen as well.

Anonymous said...

Oh! Dairy Queen, yes! Mister Misty. Cherry dipped cones. Dilly bars. It's all just too sexy.
-P

Anonymous said...

I'd gladly pay you tomorrow for a Misty Float today.