It's after midnight and I just walked past a restaurant where a family was just sitting down to dinner. It's Sunday. At midnight. Everyone should be home and in bed.
Today we went to church, ate lunch and took a nap. I'll write about church later. Right now you will only hear about 4pm on.
At 4pm we went to Brooklyn. I had heard about roberta's pizza and wanted to go last year but we never made it. Last year Brooklyn looked like a wasteland to me. I just didn't get it. Lots of sidewalk, not a lot of anything else. Today that changed. Today I had pizza as it was meant to be for the first time in my life. Today I had roberta's.
Roberta's pizza looks like a dump. The outside is covered with graffiti. The hostess has piercings and wildly colored hair - a little like pepper's from franklins street. Lots of loud music, long family style tables, and a 45 minute wait. We signed up and walked outside to wait. Then we saw it...Robertas has a take out section further down the block. We cancelled our wait list and hit up the take out.
I watched them make this creation from scratch - super thin dough, original tomato sauce, globs of fresh mozzarella, leaves of fresh basil. Then they slide it in the oven and this is key - you can see the fire in that oven. The edges of the pizza get charred and the mozzarella takes new form. And then they gave it to me in a lovely box that I took outside.
We ate it sitting on a wooden railing in the street. It changed my life.
While we were eating we met a pizza tour guide. This will be my new career. People pay him money and then they get on bikes, ride around Brooklyn and hit up the best pizza places to sample pizza and compare. I'm going to learn everything from this guy. He can't possibly do this forever. He needs me to take his place. I like bikes. I like pizza. It's perfect.
This particular section of Brooklyn used to be factories and rough neighborhoods. But now, new restaurants are coming in. Art galleries are opening. Factories are turning into apartments. Sound like Durham any one? I loved it. Graffiti everywhere among a city being reborn, transforming into something new.
We walked and explored. Then we found some housing projects which quickly turned into Puerto Rico. No really. There was a sign that said it. And flags, and people, and Spanish. Didn't see Jenny from the block though. That was a little disappointing.
Then we found a whole park of people playing kickball. And we needed a bathroom but that park bathroom was out of order. So we walked. And there was no bathroom. Anywhere. Until McDonald's. Thank you McDonald's for the soda and the bathroom key and the 30 minute rest.
Clearly we needed dessert. So back on the train to mulberry street. You can't have pizza without a cannoli!
So we ate our cannoli and walked from mulberry to Washington square park.
Did I mention that this was gay pride weekend? It's gay pride weekend in New York. There have been festivals and parades and buildings are all lit up with rainbow lights and fireworks.
As we left Washington square park we found the parade route - we knew this because at 10pm it was still blocked off by the nypd and was littered like a parade had been there. The parade started at noon and it was still blocked off. This was interesting so we followed the entire route. From Washington square park back to our hotel where it started at noon.
Like any event in NYC or anywhere else for that matter there was trash everywhere. Water bottles, juice bottles, feathers, glitter, confetti, candy, etc. block after block. We stopped for water at 7-11 and ask the cashier has the road been blocked all day? Yes all day. All day.
Then the clean up began and no one can clean up better than NYC sanitation. First, they use leaf blowers to blow it all into the street. Then a big sweeper comes along and sweeps it up into a vacuum. Then the scrubber comes through. After that the port-a-potty guy comes - that was too gross so we went two blocks over and worked our way back to the hotel.
So look at a map. That's a lot of walking. My feet hurt. I'm going to sleep.
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