Birthday

My birthday was on Tuesday ("Welcome to your mid-30s!"), the result of which being my dragging Ed to Brooklyn from Monday to Wednesday. It rained the entire trip, pretty hard at times, rendering my original plan of frolicking outside around Brooklyn moot, but we had a good time anyway. We went to Junior's for lunch (because it's very important to introduce non-natives to the glory that is their cheesecake), then wandered across the street to LIU in the hopes of finding a few people to talk to (utter failure; I was happy to see some former co-workers but a few folks I really wanted to see were either in meetings or were off campus). We decided to hit up the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side; we went on the "Getting By" tour, which was really interesting, especially considering it wasn't a museum I'd heard of before this trip: They'd bought a tenement building and restored two individual apartments (one from a previous Prussian Jewish family in the 1870s; the other from an Italian Catholic family during the Great Depression), while leaving the rest of it intact. (I love history museums.) Really good stuff.

For dinner we went to Les Halles, in the Financial District. Appetizer: Tartiflette (sliced potatoes, bacon, onions, and imported cheese); entree: Choucrote de Poisson (seafood sausage, smoked salmon sausage, sea scallops, smoked herring, salmon caviar, boiled potato, and sauerkraut slow cooked in Riesling) and a glass of the 2007 Pinot Blanc. And the chocolate mousse for dessert. After dinner we attempted to walk around Brooklyn Heights, but once we got off the subway we were nearly knocked over by the wind and rain, so we called it a night. I left feeling frustrated by the sheer amount of rain. Nothing like being smote on your birthday; fortunately we had a really good time anyway.

But - presents! I got books! Specifically: a Thailand travel book; a Tokyo City Guide; and a cookbook of Irish traditional cooking that has recipes in it that I fear will require me to practice them several times before they come out well enough to be edible.