Summer Weekend in the City
Thursday:
We had a prelude to the weekend, right in the middle of the week, with Thursday being a public holiday (Juneteenth). At midday, we left one playdate (in the Children’s Museum of Manhattan) to join another playdate, in Central Park. Our second date of the day was with someone we had met the week before, in the elevator as we left an amazing party in a pre-war building on the Upper West Side. (I’m still talking about children here. It was a 4 year old’s birthday party and we were leaving at 4pm).
I've never seen anyone hit it off as well as this kid did with my kids. She was hilarious and they were all having so much fun, that the mom and I exchanged numbers and said we should meet up. Five days later and here we were, standing in the glorious heat of a Central Park playground…until the weather changed and after an almighty crack of lightning, it bucketed down. Everyone was running for cover, including us. We ran towards our new friend’s apartment - my kids dressed in their swimsuits and no shoes, both crammed into a small buggy and me, pushing the very heavy buggy with one hand, while holding a Paw Patrol umbrella over my head with the other, looking down occasionally at the four bare legs, sticking out at all angles out of the buggy.
The mom and I also hit it off. She is from Venezuela and told me that her sister-in-law recently got married in Ireland, in Limerick. The couple had no connection to Ireland but wanted a destination wedding in an English-speaking country, and Ireland fit the bill. She said English-speaking was really important to the groom in particular but it turned out to be irrelevant as no one could understand a word the priest said anyway. God forgive me but I snorted.
Friday:
Back to school on Friday and regular readers will know that Fridays are ‘Family Fridays’ and that I’m always complaining that I’m never not in my kids’ school. This Family Friday was a community breakfast and I upgraded my usual offering of “just add milk” Irish soda bread, from the packet I bought on Amazon, to just-add-milk-Irish-soda-bread-from-the-packet-I-bought-on-Amazon… with smoked salmon. The other Irish family made sage and onion sausage rolls and holy moly! I had four of them. Not the Irish being food snobs yet again but our combined offerings were by far the most popular and also the most delicious. Guava jam on shop bought bread? Try harder, Nicaragua. The Japanese octopus balls were tasty, I’ll grant them that, but when I asked the Japanese couple if they’d made them, they said they “heated” them. Oh OK Japan, I was only up since 7am, slaving over a…measuring jug, carefully pouring 500ml of milk to add to the pre-mixed bread mixture but whatever, nice heating I guess.
If you think that I must be the miserable half of the couple, you are wrong. This was David’s first Family Friday and the 3K class was having a mini “moving up” ceremony after breakfast. The morning was slated for 8:30 to 9:30 and at 9:15, David said to me “I suppose we’ll all just go now, will we?”. No, I told him, we still had to have the ceremony. “Oh great, another verse”, David whispered in my ear, as the 4 year olds gave a performance of a song they’d learned that year. See? Not the miserable one. When we eventually got out of there at 10am, I said to David that I'd see him back here at 1:30pm.
“WHAT?”, he said.
“Yes, it’s the other graduation. In the auditorium. Bring your ID. There’s refreshments in the class afterwards”.
Welcome to my world, my friend. A casual three hours in the school of a Friday.
At 1:30pm we were back in the school to see the Kindergarteners perform a Taylor Swift song with some changed lyrics: “cause the readers gonna read, read, read, read, read and the writers gonna write, write, write, write, write”.
To make a fuss of the graduates, we all went out for a downtown dinner. I had a voucher to Lupa on Thompson Street which my brother gave me for my birthday. I had the carbonara and David had lamb and we both said it was one of the best meals we’ve eaten in the city. The kids had plain spaghetti with cheese followed by mango sorbets and a post-dinner play in the Washington Square playground.
Saturday:
I took the kids to the Hans Christian Anderson statue on the East side of Central Park, where there is live storytelling every Saturday of the summer at 11am. (I later told our neighbour across the hall that we’d been at this and he said he used to bring his goddaughter to it 30 years ago). I've been to a fair few storytelling events for adults in the city and this was the highest quality of storytelling by a mile. Without a single accessory - not even a book - it held the kid’s attention for an hour. My favourite story was the ‘Peddler of Swaffham’ and when I asked the 5 year old her favourite, hers was the same. On the walk home, we watched the small sailboats, the rowboats, climbed the Alice in Wonderland statue, venmoed ‘Bubbleman’ $10 so we could make giant bubbles, stopped at the Bethesda fountain, saw a black squirrel and walked through a tunnel the kids recognised as being the one Kevin runs into in Home Alone 2.
We passed an Albanian parade on the Upper West Side and I snapped a picture of the girls in front of a float and sent it to a mom in the school who is from Albania. The image on the float the girls were standing in front of was of the Albanian crest with Albanian writing above it. After I’d already sent the photo, we walked round the side of the float and saw that in English it said “Greece can’t hide from genocide - 80 years and still no apology”. I hope the recipient of the photo agrees with that sentiment because in the photo, the kids are actually pointing up at the words and giving big cheesy grins.
Back at the ranch, I passed the kids off to David who was just back from a solo brunch. How long do you have to live in New York before you stop remarking on the price of everything? Or asking people to guess how much you spent on something? $44 for his omelette and coffee anyway. “Plain omelette, nothin’ fancy”, he added, after I had guessed $44 first go. (I am so good at guessing, it is scary. Any way I can put this to good use?). He brought the kids off to a nearby soccer party and I cashed in the other voucher I got for my birthday - one for a FaceGym facial in Nordstrom from my parents. It was heavenly.
Saturday night:
I’ve expressed my gratitude for Irish babysitters before, but can I just give an example of an actual conversation I had with a new babysitter who arrived at the door:
-Oh hi Ava, you’re friends with Ciara? I don’t actually know her, she was just the first number on the spreadsheet of Irish babysitters shared in the Whatsapp. She said she couldn’t make it but gave me your number.
-I don’t actually know her either - I think she’s friends with my friend Michaela?
- I don’t know Michaela but WELCOME! Where are you from?
We hopped on a pair of Citibikes and cycled across the Queensboro Bridge for a night at the Queens Night Market. Before we left, I wondered had I ever been to Queens before and I came up with these instances:
We taxied to a soft play centre in Queens one rainy day, soon after we arrived.
I took the kids to another soft play centre last summer. It was too hot to go outside and I fancied using someone else’s aircon for a change.
We went to the US open in Flushing Meadows last year
We’ve three times visited The Butcher’s Block in Sunnyside
One of the kids had a doctor’s appointment in Bayside.
OK, I have seen Queens, I thought. And I fully believed that…until I got there.
I feel like I saw more of the city on that one hour bike ride than I have done in the past three years. The sidewalks were packed, the playgrounds were packed. There were people everywhere. People of all cultures, ages and sizes. There were supermarkets with outdoor fruit stalls, neighbours enjoying cookouts in their front yards, families going to Saturday night Mass. Music was playing everywhere. It felt like we had taken a trip much further away than to the next borough.
We parked up at Corona Park and made our way to the night market to enjoy even more diversity. Hundreds of food stalls are set up and thousands of people are milling round them. We started with savoury Japanese pancakes and then we had Haitian griot. We had Peruvian ceviche and Fujianese lychee pork. We had Jamaican oxtail and Malaysian omelette before finishing off with cereal flavoured babka for dessert, and calling it a night.