Appetisers

Another busy day in NY.

Today we went to see the Brooklyn Bridge and Mr A took (literally) HUNDREDS of snaps of the bridge from every angle yet he didn't even publish one of the bridge pics, but chose another one!

We found an absolutely fantastic place for lunch right in the centre of the Dumbo region of Brooklyn, serving such a huge selection of wonderful (yet all very down-to-earth) foods. The choice was amazing, but in the end we both plumped for the (meat...whatever that actually meant?) lasagne plus a hot coffee, as it was another bitterly cold day and we needed to thaw out. But while we were waiting for the meals, I spotted these - Garlic Knots - priced at $1.35 for six (even though we got seven), which they simply heated in the oven in silver foil for about 3 minutes. My word - they were delicious! Who cares about a "diet" when you're on holiday and you have the opportunity to sample something like this, eh?

After being fed and watered, we toddled back across the Brooklyn Bridge with my request to find the Canal Street region - famed for the street markets. As it turned out, it was more like lots of tenements with lock-up garages at street level selling the most awful tat and all of the tat exactly the same. The only thing that appeared different was a shop selling nothing but brightly lacquered chopsticks (since the area bordered China town), which was my alternative blip of the day.

Yet we still hadn't finished walking and continued through a park where we found a number of seemingly tame squirrels - both grey and black (black? Yes, they were black - never seen such a thing before, but you can find out on the internet that they are actually soon to outnumber red squirrels here in the UK and are common in parts of the USA). Lovely little things they were and luckily I happened to have a bag of brazil nuts in my bag (just in case we got peckish, you understand) and ended up feeding the whole packet, one-by-one by hand to the squirrels. It seemed they were used to the attention, as they were very polite in taking the nuts from my fingers, gently resting their hands on my fingers before taking the nut each time. Mr A took a number of photos of me feeding the squirrels, but I don't think he has published any of them.

So, at the end of an exhausting day we retired to a nearby restaurant and I confess that we had ANOTHER full meal (although I only had a mozzarella & tomato salad - honest) washed down with a delicious Chianti in a reassuringly large glass. Perfect!