We decided that we were going to spend the rest of the afternoon in Chinatown (we've been to Chinatowns in San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, might be another one that I can't recall at this moment). It looked like one of the biggest Chinatown's we had ever seen and looked very interesting from the bus. We had originally thought of going to the Brooklyn Chinatown....but decided that we wanted to be back in Manhattan.
And interesting it was.
The biggest annoyance was the old Chinese women on every street corner and in between constantly coming up to you and saying "Chanel? Chanel? Rolex? ". It got irritating. Our first mission once we got there was to find a place to eat lunch. A nice, safe, clean place in the middle of Chinatown. We "yelped" several close places and none of them seemed to be what we were looking for. Just so happens that Chinatown is the neighborhood next to Little Italy.....so we chose Italian :-)
We found Forlini's......had good ratings and I can always spaghetti for lunch. This place looked like a restaurant out of The Godfather. The waiters working were all older men with wonderful thick Italian accents.
We feasted on an antipasto salad and some kind of pasta with Bolognese. The bread was out of this world crazy delicious. I could have just sat and ate bread all day.
Now that we had full bellies.....it was time to explore Chinatown. Our mission was to get souvenirs for anybody that we felt like getting one for and I wanted a Brooklyn t-shirt.
Each and every street in this city is amazing and just so different from living here in Houston. It's just a fascinating place to visit.
I just love being visiting here. It's just so much hustle and bustle all the time.
Easy to spot which neighborhood is Chinatown and which is
Little Italy from the top and bottom picture
In our hunt for souvenirs......Paul bought a selfie-stick. Seriously people.....we thought these things were really stupid, but when you travel with just 2 people......they are awesome to use. You don't have to continually ask people to take a picture of us. (*there's going to be a whole special blog written about selfie-sticks.....you're not going to want to miss that one)
Here he is trying it out:
While he was messing around with this.....I bought a NYC tote bag and a Brooklyn T-shirt....yay!
Some interesting things we found as we walked along:
Lots of street vendors selling things I never have seen before.
Look carefully at this picture, you'll see a tourist you might recognize in it.
(seriously, this guy just wanders off and leaves me doing my own thing)
Well it was about 5pm and we had big plans for the evening (one of the main reasons we
came to this city)......so we fought the crowded subways and headed back to the hotel
to shower up and change clothes.
We got to City Winery to see Eilen Jewell. Our seats were awesome and we had nice people at our table to chat with.
We decided to eat dinner later that evening because we had eaten a BIG late lunch.
The concert was awesome and I really enjoyed her rockabilly/country music. Paul had the highlight of his life when she signed his CD and he got to chat with her for a bit.
The venue was a place that made their own wine.
I snapped this picture when I was down in the basement using the restroom.
We snapped some pictures and had someone snap a picture of us out in front. We were dressed so nicely -- and that doesn't happen very often. I even had on a brand new dress (which I love), so I definitely had to record this occasion.
(lighting not good......boo)
As we waited for the subway to take us back to our Times Square......
I had Paul snap a picture of me at the station we were at.
Our next mission was to find someplace to eat.
On our bus trip the day before, the lady who sat in front of us told us about the Stardust Diner where the waiters and waitresses sing. Sounded like something cool and different.....so off we went to find this restaurant.
We had no idea it was going to take us so long to find the place (dumb GPS kept giving us different directions), so it was about 11:30pm when we went in to eat. We ended up splitting a Patty Melt and some cole slaw. Too late.....didn't want to eat a big meal at this time of the night.
I happened to have the lucky seat where the singing waitstaff would walk along the ledge behind me. Gave me a good view. The singing was amazing. They have to audition to get their job and they are all actually aspuiring singers/dancers/actors who are looking for their big break on Broadway. Was a fun place to eat at!
After eating......it was getting a bit late, so we jumped on the subway and headed back to our hotel. Tomorrow would be our last full day here in the city and we already had reservations for a couple of things to do the next day.......it was going to be another long and busy one!
No comments:
Post a Comment