I don't think we ever really recovered from that hangover yesterday, and we didn't get back to our hotel until about 3 in the morning last night, so the lay-in this morning was necessary for our basic functions.
When we finally emerged from the hotel, it was feeling much better than we had and it was with the satisfaction that we've made the most of our time so far. Today would be a much more laid back experience - we don't have any pre-booked things we have to rush to get to at a specific time, though we are meeting up with my friend Sarah, who lives here, later on this evening.
We headed to our local coffee shop, Little Canal, for caffeine and breakfast - we've been here every day and I could easily see being a regular if I lived here. It's honestly the perfect coffee shop, with a short menu and good coffee.
Today we decided to head back over to Brooklyn and go to the Flea Market in Dumbo.
As an aside, I've just googled "why is it called Dumbo" and like so many things here, it's a freaking acronym. There's a million of these that I've never even thought of because the acronym has become much more ingrained into the pop culture zeitgeist that the actual name itself:
SoHo: South of Houston Street.
NoHo: North of Houston Street.
NoLita: North of Little Italy.
DUMBO: Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.
TriBeCa: Triangle Below Canal Street.
I refuse to say "FiDi" for the financial district, I don't know why but the sound of it irritates the shit out of me.
Sweet holy lord, I just looked up a map of manhattan neighbourhoods and it's actually bonkers.
This whole map is so interesting to me, because these funny little neighbourhoods didn't just appear already planned out. It took hundreds of years to get to this point, and there's a million notable things that happened to make Manhattan what it is today. Like you can see the chaos from the early settlement down at the lower tip of the island, and then they must have quickly realized that the expansive growth of the city required some planning and a grid later on. I'm going to sound like an absolute nerd, but I fucking love etymology.
Anyway, I digress.
We caught the subway over to Dumbo and had a wander around the flea market.
I thought I would buy more here! I got Mallory a couple of teeny tiny books of mystery stories - like they were only 2.5 inches by 3 inches in size - and I grabbed myself, because I'm SO cool, a buffalo head nickel to add to my foreign coin collection. And there were a million other things that I would have immediately impulse bought, but I was mindful of the fact that I was also going to Colombia and suitcase space was a premium.
Since it was a bit of a grey day and we felt like a walk would do us some good, we decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and snap some tourist trash pictures.
The world has changed all around it, but Roebling's erection still stands!
I think our unflappable energy from the last two days was maybe starting to wane a bit. It's probably the lingering effects of our accidentally alcohol based first night at Pianos, or possibly even the desaturation of the outside world brought on by the overcast day, but it felt like we were persevering through something as we crossed this bridge.
Maybe we just needed fuel.
Jenna grabbed us some kind of delicious fruit dish from a food truck on the manhattan side of the bridge which we inhaled as we continued to walk towards the subway, but we knew we needed something more substantial for lunch.
We decided to head to the Chelsea Market and grab something to eat since our final stop of the day was walking The High Line, a decommissioned, above-ground subway line that they decided to turn into a green space walking path.
It's actually incredible how this city carves out green space in such a densely populated area. I mean besides Central Park, which is actually massive, there are little squares and parks all over the city, but there's also trees planted in every corner, crack, and sliver of land that can accommodate them.
We leave tomorrow for Canada, and even though we're tired and could be perfectly happy with a bodega sandwich to take back to the hotel, we heard about a pop-up restaurant way up in Washington Heights that demanded our presence.
We obviously had the cheesecake.
It's rare that you visit somewhere so famous and it lives up to your expectations, but NYC is exactly as you think it would be. The accents, the monuments, the weird little events and businesses, the food, the sheer amount of walking - nothing has disappointed.
As we drove back to Canada, I thought about how New York was never on my bucket list of places I absolutely needed to go in my life, but I swear it's at the top of my list of places I've been.
Things between the US and Canada are tense at best and it's easy to generalize Americans as their disappointing stereotype, but I swear that New York is different, the people are different. They don't suffer fools, they're not going to let something slide that they don't believe in and they loudly denounce wrongdoing.
I don't plan on coming to the states while he who must not be named is in office, but I will make New York an exception to this rule.
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