NYC Winter

In NYC in the wintertime, there is one boiler for the whole building, and all the radiator heat rises so

sometimes people have to hang NAKED outside their open windows in 30 degree temps!  (I guess!)

In NYC in the winter, your car will get completely covered with salt.  So....be a proper NY-er.....

DON'T BOTHER DRIVING!

Maybe you could be a new kind of NY-er and GET ON YER BIKE!  (Or, that is, on some corporate entity's mobile advertising unit.)

If you are a proper NY-er, you wouldn't forget to visit Ceci-Cela.   It was one of the very first French pastry shops in town and most authentic.  It still is!  On a NYC winter day, it is a GOOD THING.

A young visitor to NYC once remarked to me that:  "There ARE no cars in NYC, only TAXICABS." (True-ish.)

David Beckham is EVERYWHERE!  There is a reason for that: the Dude is CUT! Yes, even in a white long sleeved shirt.  I'm telling you that from personal experience.  But that's all I can tell you.

In NYC, commerce is pervasive.  Even the quirkiest kind.  This is an "ad" for an antiques auction house.

This is the Bowery Bar.  It used the be the cutting edge of the cutting edge.  Now it's the kind of place you bring your Mother!  Either that, or it's always been your hang-out - piercings, tatts and all and now, you're old enough to be your Mother!!!!   How does that happen?  (So quick?)

This is why I left NYC!  I hate that dirty gray snow to match a dirty gray sky!  (This photo has been lightened and  color-enhanced.   Otherwise it would be just too depressing.)

But change is on the horizon.  i.e., nobody can afford to live in NYC anymore!  So they move away

in order to be able to afford to stay in hotels like the Standard (E. Village) instead?  Apparently.  (I did not.)

You could not have guessed that by the lines outside the Momofuku restaurant.  Can't remember if this was the noodle bar, or Momofuku Ssam.  But then, maybe all those queued-up crowds were from out of town?

In NYC when I visited, I didn't need giant signs to tell me this.  More pictures would have been taken if la Famille Paradis had not been so busy negotiating street-corner lakes of grey slush!

Casa Mono was the consolation for my snowy labors.  It still has some of the best food (tapas) in NYC.  Usually it is chock-a-block with happy foodies.  At 4 p.m. it looked like this.

At 3:45 p.m. it looked like this.  (That is rice pudding with, I believe, a passion fruit sorbet and a candied satsuma sauce.)   Chef's should love me because I completely forget to photograph their food until it is mostly all gone!  But sadly that makes me a BAD, BAD blogger.

Somewhere else to while away your gray winter afternoons: my old favorite:  THE STRAND BOOKSTORE.  Home from home!  Skip the mall-i-fied upstairs and go straight to the basement for that old-school East Village funk!

That was my Sunday two weeks ago in New York City.  How has your Sunday been?