Thibaut visited this past weekend. He arrived across the George Washington Bridge, which is right in our neighborhood, on Saturday before noon. We walked to Fort Tryon Park, where the Cloisters are. Though cold, it was sunny, and we warmed up quickly on our walk. The park was lovely, as always.
We ate lunch at the Malecón, nicknamed “El rey de pollo” (the king of chicken), a Dominican restaurant in our neighborhood. As far as I can tell, Dominican specialties are whole roast chicken with beans, rice, and fried plantains—all for about $12 total—yum!
Next, we scurried down to the Lincoln Center area to watch a movie, The Queen. It was very good. I cried a lot. I always cry at sad movies. Several weeks ago at school I saw a Chilean movie called Machuca, about some kids growing up around the time of the coup against Allende. That made me so incredibly sad that I was still crying about fifteen minutes after the movie ended. And I don’t like crying in public because my eyes get all red and puffy. But I am not really embarrassed about being a movie-crybaby anymore. I used to be, because I remember when I was very small I was taken to see Bambi, which can be a traumatic experience for a young child, and I cried a lot, and my family made fun of me. Of course, they didn’t mean any harm—it was probably very funny that a kid was crying at a cartoon—but for a kid it isn’t just a cartoon; it’s real life.
Anyway, after The Queen, Thibaut and I stopped at the nearby chain home-furnishing store (which shall remain unnamed) and bought a little stick vacuum cleaner and candle holders for the apartment. The vacuum cleaner, by the way, is marvelous; it works wonderfully, so it will take less time to clean!
Once back at the apartment, we prepared for an evening of parties. Thibaut, Seena and I went first to a party in the neighborhood at my friend Krystal’s apartment. Krystal is a classmate of mine who is in the TESOL program, and she was having a housewarming/birthday party. It just so happens that she and Thibaut have the same birthday, too. We hung out there for a brief time before Thibaut and I went downtown to have a birthday celebration dinner for ourselves at a French bistro, La bonne soupe. It was very nice, but we sat at a crowded set of tables for two where we overheard everybody’s conversation. The couple next to us was, as Thibaut would say, “on a PAINFUL f.d.” (first date), and he could not get over how trashy they were. They just could not keep their hands to themselves, so we could not avoid seeing them rubbing each other’s arms across the table, etc. Anyway, the food was lovely; Thibaut had escargot (which I tried for the first time, tastes like yummy buttery mussels, with a slightly stronger chewiness that kind of disturbed me) and quiche Lorraine, because he’s from Lorraine, and I had the onion soup and a crepe of goat cheese and leeks. We were going to have dessert, but the heat was on so high in the restaurant that Thibaut thought he was going to have heat stroke, and we were full anyway, so we left without. Afterwards, we went further downtown to a bar where my friend Bill was having his birthday party. Unfortunately we could not stay very long; we met Seena after a party she’d gone to and we headed home.
Sunday morning all three of us went to El Presidente, another Dominican restaurant in our neighborhood, for brunch. I had the pancakes, which Krystal had recommended. The cafe con leche was also divine. Thibaut then drove home to Lewisburg, PA (where he teaches French literature/culture/cinema/the works at Bucknell), and I went down to school for study group.
Tuesday, I took off work and went on a field trip with the dual-language students at the school where I’m observing. Two of my classmates came, too, because we are going to do Language Experience sessions with them later, and we’re going to make books about their field trip based on their oral narratives. Cristina and I ended up chaperoning the kindergarteners, who were really a handful of rambunctious little kids. We were exhausted herding them around for a couple hours, but they were incredibly cute. The “farm” where we went turned out to be more like a field in residential Queens County filled with a few traumatized ducklings, chicks, sheep, cows, pigs, and ponies, who were being petted and harassed by hundreds of elementary school children. It was sunny but pretty freaking cold. At the end, each of us got to take home a pumpkin. This had been called a field trip to a “pumpkin patch,” so I thought we’d be out in a pumpkin field picking pumpkins off the vine. Instead, there was a big pile of pumpkins in the parking lot. It was still nice, though.
One of the kindergarteners said, as we passed the cow they had all milked, “I like that cow.” I said, “I like that cow, too; it was very nice.” The girl said, “But it was peeing.” I said, “That wasn’t pee; that was milk.” And the girl looked incredulous, “Milk?!” I said, “Yes, that’s where milk comes from.” “Ew!” she said. “So where do hamburgers come from?” I said, “Hamburgers also come from cows, but it’s the meat, so you have to kill the cow first.” She was shocked.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and instead of promoting the fall slaughter of turkeys, we are considering encouraging rather the continuous slaughter of free-range chickens.
Luis arrives in New York tonight, his first time in this fair city. We will spend Thanksgiving Day cooking and eating, and maybe after Thanksgiving we’ll go to the zoo and watch the otters, or do some other things like that.
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