Elusive Arepas

After searching Brooklyn all day yesterday for an arepas (the arepa is a flat, unleavened patty made of cornmeal which can be grilled, baked, or fried and eaten with a filling or topping) lunch spot and coming up empty-stomached, today, we stumbled upon one called Guayoyo.  We ordered the lunch special which was an arepa and soup or salad for $8.  The waiter recommended the queso guayanes arepa which is filled with semihard unripened cheese and avocado.  As New Yorkers say, "Love".

We are now back at home watching, feeling, and hearing the sky fall!  Hail is pelting the ever present traffic on 3rd Avenue, thunder and lightning have been consistently interupting the din of city noise, and people are scurrying for cover.  Funny though, now that we are writing about the storm, it seems to be calming.  Summer must be over...

Vagabonding

Being professional vagabonds isn't easy.  Even with the advent of Craigslist, one must pick the right time to buy and sell things like bicycles.  Today we posted our bicycles and just in case they sell soon, we took the ride to Brooklyn that we promised ourselves we'd take before we left the city.  We rode to Brooklyn over the Williamsburg Bridge as per Ducca's suggestion and were not disappointed.  For our return to Manhattan we chose the Brooklyn Bridge to knock a few more things off our bucket list - checking out Ground Zero, Battery Park, and Chinatown. 

There is an undeniable, palpable feeling of loss at Ground Zero.  It is a similar feeling to being at the Arizona Memorial.  One cannot help but think of all the innocent people who just went to work that day.  As we looked around, we noticed that some of the adjacent buildings seemed to have marks.  We wondered how many of those marks were scars left from 9/11/2001.  We also wondered what the people in those buildings witnessed.  Having just visited Rockafeller Center and learned that it took nine years to build in the 1930's, it seemed remarkable that nine years and four days after the attacks on the WTC the memorial still seems to be in the early stages of development.  We don't know what to make of it.  Just thought it was strange.

Battery Park proved to be an awfully nice place to ride a bike, take in a sunset, or pepper the volleyball.  (How's Todd's setting form Richard? And Lady Liberty's?)

If given the choice, when in New York, skip Chinatown.

All in all, we are glad we rode everywhere we did today because a Craigslister called about a bike and we think we will sell it tomorrow.  So go the lives of itinerant people.