Prime Suspect and The Squid and the Whale

The mornings come early in New York. I spent the better half of my day in Brooklyn checking out more schools and going to get fingerprinted for my teaching certification. I change my mind, the better half did not include these activities. In fact, I can't even say it was half considering the hours we've been keeping here in the city. I'm sure we'll slow down a bit when we both have jobs to go to everyday. Anyway, the inside of a Brooklyn police precinct is much like you'd expect. It's hot, sweaty and stale in the lobby. It took forever for the "reception cop" to ask me why I was there. So long in fact that it happened to be about forty minutes after my schedules appointment. There are wanted posters all over the place. Don't worry, none of these correlate to the area we live in, just the area south and east and west of us. After a significantly brief period of running my fingers through ink (which I could smell for the rest of the day and could not help but sniff like magic markers) and placing them one at a time in small squares, I departed dear old Brooklyn to meet Stephanie back in the city. The next time I'm here I'll be a resident.


By this point in the afternoon schools were beginning to get out and hopes of making it to the ones I have my eye on in Manhattan were all but lost. I also had to consider the fact that I wasn't dressed the part for an interview thanks to a lesson I learned about Brooklyn in the summertime in a shirt and tie on Tuesday. We headed out to get some lunch and visited a couple of New York tourism staples. When we actually live here, Steph and I have a plan to spend the weekends acting as tourists and hitting up all of the sites in the city. We are going to start with one of those tacky double-decker bus rides where they stop to gawk at every hole in the sidewalk where a star has spit and every building one was arrested in. We might even wear I Heart NY t-shirts and statue of liberty visor caps. We'll do it up properly. There will be pictures, I promise. As we took in the sites of the city I took some shots of the Apple Store, St. Patrick's, FAO Schwartz, and some other stuff I took while we were walking around.

We ran through Central Park and took note of all of the nannies acting as surrogate parents to the children of people too busy to be busied with their own children at 5:00 in the evening. Central park is beautiful by the way. Incredible. I know it is breathtaking on its own, but after walking around the concrete jungle of the city, it is such a breath of fresh air to see more than one two trees grouped together.

We were just in time to sneak into the Natural History Museum before it closed to check out the space exhibit, dinosaurs, and of course, the squid and the whale (though disappointingly, these are in separate rooms in real life). We didn't have time to actually look at any of the exhibits, but it is one of the first things I want to do when I have a whole day to explore the premises.

We ended up going back to Ray's for dinner. Hey, it's cheap and delicious. We then headed to Union Square where a series of non-violent protests were being held condemning China's actions in Tibet and calling for a boycott of the Olympics. I joined a mailing list for more info on the next protest. This is such a crazy place.