21/4/13 – Chinatown and Williamsburg on a Sunday

 As it was a beautiful Sunday we decided to take an excursion to Little Italy and wander from there up Mulberry Street to Mott Street and Chinatown (which now seems to be swelling into and consuming most of what remains of Little Italy). It was very pleasant walk but the scenes which confronted us were, shall we say, just a little different to the images portrayed in Ella Fitzgerald’s famous song about this area.

We saw nearly everything edible for sale - frogs, fish, meat, vegetables and all live or just killed this morning. Peter was in raptures of course. No wonder he had been so keen to take me walking down here. For him it was just like being back in Hong Kong and, as the culmination of his ‘cunning plan’, he had us sitting at a table for 15 in a Yum Cha Restaurant filled with 200 chinese and just us two ‘whities’ not long after!

  

After Yum Cha we needed to walk off the vast amounts of food we consumed for the usual price ($25 including a tip). So we headed over to Lafayette Street to visit the Supreme Skateboard Shop and bought some more loot for our nephew Jordan. No doubt he is making a killing on Ebay since these items that we send him direct from Supreme’s NYC store are only available at the NYC store and are all limited release items that are at best only in stock for one week.

As one does on a lazy Sunday afternoon in New York, we then caught a cab over to Williamsburg, the uber-cool suburb of Brooklyn, where we found, and on the corner of N11th and Wythe Street, the ‘world famous’ Brooklyn Brewery.

In 1988 the original brewery was located in Bushwick but as its popularity grew (and the reputation of Bushwick didn’t) the brewery relocated to a bigger premises that incorporated a ‘beer hall’. We tasted five beers (pilsner, wheat, hot and very hot hopped and of course their signature Brooklyn lager) and bought souvenir t-shirts for Cameron and Alistair.

To our amusement on our way home, we walked past what we thought was some guy who’d turned on his BBQ and opened up his back yard for the public to have a few burgers. Turns out it was The Gibson Pub beer garden but the BBQ sausages and cheeseburgers were nonetheless delicious!

After taking in beers and burgers we walked up Bedford Avenue (the longest and coolest street in Brooklyn) and took in the the sunny Sunday afternoon vibe. The trendy youngsters who live here are gradually losing the battle to keep the brand name stores and the richer, older ‘cool crew’ out of this area. Sadly it is now becoming very commercial with expensive shops replacing the buskers and the guys with bracelets and ‘incense’ for sale.

After such a lazy mellow day we were definitely ‘feelin’ groovy’ and not wanting to ‘move too fast’, so we caught a cab home over the famous 59th Street Bridge. (For those of you who are too young to understand this allusion

"The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" was a hit song in 1966 for the folk music duo Simon and Garfunkel. "59th Street Bridge" is the colloquial name of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge in New York City. The song's message is immediately delivered in its opening verse: "Slow down, you move too fast" and in its title ‘Feelin Groovy’. All in all, this was another great day.