SUNDAY IN NEW YORK

There's a street fair going on right out on Broadway.  I love NY street fairs.  They are a mixture of artists, junk salesmen, street food, music and bunches of other stuff.  The quality ranges from crap to classic -- though tilted more towards crap. 

I basically went because I wanted a nutella crepe, which I didn't get until right before I came home.  There's a new wrinkle in the street fair today.  They're having a ramen competition, and apparently you buy a cup for $4 and you can sample and vote for the ramen from about 20 restaurants.  I may go back out and try that. 

I also happened upon a wonderful craft show at Lincoln center -- one I've actually been to before when we were here, that has a lot of high-end vendors, and of course I bought stuff there, too.  It was really nice stuff to look at, and at least two of the vendors were at the craft show in SF in August.

As I was walking into Lincoln center, this guy was on the sidewalk with a piano he's apparenly dragging around the US and playing on the street wherever he doesn't get arrested.  He was pretty good. 

I saw this pretty cool sweater at the street fair, too, but in the final analysis, the fact that is was cool and not warm kept me from buying it. By the way, yesterday it was quite cool, but today I was dressed way too warmly. I think this is because it was so warm in the apartment when I got up, I just assumed it was cold outside and it wasn't. So partially, I couldn't try on that sweater either, but I did rather assume it would hug all my lumps in an unattractive way. I also passed up buying a cover for the iphone I don't even have yet. I thought the cover was pretty funny. It looked like an old cassette tape.
By the way, the house at the top of the blog is just  a cute autumn house decoration. I think this is a house John and I saw during the summer which had pretty nice plants decorating the front steps. Maybe a florist or someone lives in it.

After my foray to the street fair etc., we went to St. Paul's Lutheran to listen to the evening jazz vespers.  I thought the group was pretty good, but I don't think I'll ever hear a group as good as that one that did the  Bach one year when we were here. 

We are a very funny group walking the streets.  I remember when we went to Russia about 20 years ago that we used to laugh because you would often see three old ladies or old men sitting on a bench, and it always seemed to be three. 

And we'd take pictures, because they were so cute looking.  And now I'M ONE OF THEM.  Billie and Martha are both using canes but I have the obviously fake old-lady red hair so we are a pretty hilarious group shambling down the street or sitting at the bus stop.  Billie, by the way, is the consummate New Yorker. She gets on the bus and starts looking at her ipod right away and therefore looks like every other person in NYC who has their nose in an electronic device. We had dinner in again tonight. I slaved hours in the kitchen and made biryani. I'm going to try to upload a video which is a little tiny bit of the music from the church. It doesn't sound very good on my camera, so I don't know how it will be here, and the picture is pretty bad, too.