gnat does new york

guys, i am exhausted. in the last two weeks i have flown five times and slept on four floors in six cities. i'm in chicago now and needless to say i am so happy to be back at home base, sleeping on my own mattress on my own floor. (yes, i sleep on a mattress on the floor. there is a bed frame involved. it's a long story. actually, no it's not. i bought a broken bed frame on craigslist and so my mattress sits on the floor inside the frame. i swear it's very comfortable.)

anyway, one of the floors i slept on happened to be in my friend jimmy's apartment in new york city. i informed him before my visit that my biggest priority was (surprise) to try as much food as possible, and though i was only there for 42 hours i managed to eat many, many things including breakfast at tom's restaurant in morningside heights (which you may recognize),

a hot dog and papaya juice at gray's papaya (famous hot doggery),

the inside of which is decorated like a tropical pinata,

and where i discovered that i'm not super wild about sauerkraut but that i do find the hot dog/papaya drink combination strangely delightful,

wafels and dinges (dinges is apparently dutch for "things" or "stuff" as in the stuff they put on waffles),

where i had a wafel with spekuloos spread (which is seriously amazing - it's like a peanut butter but made of ground up gingerbread cookies),

koronet pizza,

where i got a jumbo slice of pizza,

which was bigger than my head and totally overwhelming,

(i'm not the only one who felt this way),

and absolute bagels,

where i had a fresh bagel with lox spread (and it was the best bagel i had ever eaten).

not pictured are a burger which was not really memorable but to which the soundtrack was a choreographed karaoke rendition of men in black (complete with costumes and props), a street pretzel, and a reuben which was technically not from a "new york deli" but hey, my time was limited. in case you weren't counting, that's eight meals in a day and a half. be impressed.

of course, i also did things that WEREN'T food related (to kill time between meals). i saw strawberry fields in central park, across the street from the apartment building where john lennon was shot (may he rest in peace):

the lincoln center,

the GE building at 30 rockefeller plaza,

(and rockefeller center right under it, although somehow i missed the statue of atlas)

and times square, which i was resistant to the idea of visiting but which i found strangely soothing after a long day... something about all of the movement and ambient noise and huge billboards flashing has a totally unexpected (and counter-intuitive) calming effect if you sit there long enough...

i also got to spend a few hours at moma, which has a spectacular collection (including many pieces i would have sworn were in europe):

van gogh,

rousseau,

monet,

boccioni,

picasso,

braque and picasso,

warhol,

rothko (not reeeeeeaaalllllly my favorite),

pollock (which i never understood until i stood two feet from one - at which point i finally got what was so exciting about it),

and my favorite, chagall. (i remember the first time i saw a picture of this painting - i was six years old. he's been my favorite ever since.)

there were a few things i missed - the painting above is the only one of chagall's on view, and although moma has persistence of memory (probably dali's most famous painting but far from my favorite) there is only one other dali - but i saw so many more exciting things than what i've put above and there were even more that i didn't see because i got kicked out when the museum was closing. 

(as a side note, i think it's strange that i was more self-conscious about looking like a tourist in new york city than i ever feel when taking pictures of things here in chicago. i wonder why that is?) 

after new york i was in la, then back to chicago, rounding out the top three largest cities in the country in a span of five days. (it sounds cool, but it was borderline miserable - when i finally got back to chicago for good on thursday i slept for 15 hours then proceeded to lie on the couch for another two days. i am only now starting to feel like a normal human being again.) many thanks to jimmy, especially for accompanying me on many of my food related new york adventures, and to everyone else whose floor i have slept on in the last few weeks. 

and now, back to your regularly scheduled chicago-related programming.

gnat cries wolf

after two days of anxiety, tense conversations, visits from supportive friends, and general freaking out, cara and i signed the forms to say that we have withdrawn our intent to sublet the apartment.

(it was only fitting that we celebrated with a cupcake from more)


what this means is that i'm staying - until when exactly, i'm not sure, but i will not be vacating at the end of march.


it's dramatic, i know, but coming that close to giving up the apartment felt something like the chicago residency equivalent of a near death experience. until the end was staring me in the face, i didn't realize how much i wasn't ready for it. my life in chicago has become routine - i guess i've lost my sense of wonder, or at least my will to act on it and take advantage of everything the city has to offer. it's time to shake off the complacency and really enjoy what remains of my time here. i want to be sure that when it actually is time to leave, i don't do it with feelings of regret.

that said, it's time to make a bucket list. what things do i absolutely need to accomplish before i leave? what things do i need to go back and do again? help me interwebs - i want to do this right.

gnat dims and sums

for a person who loves food as much as i do, there are some pretty inexcusable gaps in my realm of food experience. i took care of one of the biggest very recently with a quick field trip back to:

chinatown. somehow i made it 25 years without ever having been to dim sum. andrew had a craving and said he knew a place, so we headed to phoenix right off the red line.

usually when i write about new foods i like to do some background research first. unfortunately the only interesting tidbit wikipedia has to offer about dim sum is that it's linked with an older tradition, yum cha (tea tasting), in which tea was served with small snacks. thankfully, over centuries the snacks served with the tea took over the show and now we have dim sum. don't get me wrong, i love tea. i just love snacks more.

the photos that follow are of food, all of which was delicious. unfortunately none of the contents of anything we ate were really explained to us, everything was just set on our table with the assumption we wanted it. (this is mostly an exaggeration. i still can't tell you what any of it is.)

shrimp?

...potstickers.

dumpling. and sauce. wonderful wonderful sauce.

shrimp roll. probably.

bbq pork bun. problematic, as they gave us three buns for four people. see unsuccessful attempt to rectify the situation below.

ribs. (pretty confident on this one.)

sesame balls filled with lotus paste. i know they don't look like balls so much as wedges, that's because the woman who brought them busted out a pair of kitchen shears and annihilated them at the table.

at the end of the meal you're glad the table is covered in paper, because they've only given you one of each type of sauce and you've dripped it everywhere while reaching over all of the little plates to dip things.

while i was in chinatown i also stopped in a little grocery store to grab some cooking paraphernalia (sesame oil, mirin, rice vinegar) for mere dollars. i want to shop there all the time.

so it turns out i don't have a lot of exciting things to say about dim sum except that it was delicious. i liked everything i ate (even if i didn't know exactly what it was), i didn't spend too many dollars, and i was full but not so full i wanted to die. 

maybe next time i take pictures of food to blog about i'll write down what it is.

gnat revisits al's (and gets it right, this time)

it's the end of the month and as of yesterday i had only completed one item out of five on my january chicago wishlist. totally unacceptable! not wanting to close the month with a dismal 20% success rate i crammed two more items from the list in at the last possible moment.

first, my triumphant return to al's beef:

i first visited al's with jalees and nicole back in august. i didn't find out until months later (thanks, man vs. food!) that REAL chicagoans get their al's beef "dipped" - the sandwich gets dunked into the vat of juice the beef was cooked in, because it just isn't messy enough to be worth eating otherwise.

so of course, i went back. i asked the guy behind the counter twice to make sure he actually dunked my sandwich this time, because it didn't look quite mushy enough to my untrained eye.

it was dunked, all right. as soon as i picked the thing up to get a picture it unleashed a greasy stream of liquid and i narrowly avoided a lap full of beef juice. the following is an actual look of shock and dismay captured by cara:

if you should ever find yourself at al's #1 beef, do yourself a favor and get your sandwich dunked.

this morning i walked down to navy pier to check out the snow sculpture competition at "snow days chicago." (see? i DON'T just write about food.) because i was feeling exceptionally touristy, i walked the scenic route along the lake. last time i was at this "beach" it was 95 degrees out... not so much, right now.

the snow sculptures were, predictably, completely awesome. i took a moment to discuss the ones i liked best with comedian bob newhart, a chicago native.

(just did some research. evidently this is his character dr. bob hartley's psychoanalyst couch from the bob newhart show.. for the purposes of this discussion i would like to pretend instead that i am on some sort of bob newhart talk show discussing snow sculpture ratings and how painful sitting on frozen metal couches can be.)

this wasn't one of my favorites but the others weren't quite as imitable as cranky captain america.

except maybe the medusa, but nobody was standing around to get a picture of my interpretation. it won first place!

my favorite was the second place winner. it's called "hommage a duchamp no. 2" and it's based on a marcel duchamp painting called nude descending a staircase no2.

i also liked this one, "that's a moray." yeah, it's actually called that.

an exhibition piece done by the team that won last year's competition. zoom in and look at the wrinkles in his face... that's all made of snow.

i'm not even certain i'm capable of putting together a half decent snowman. i haven't tried yet, but we're supposed to get a blizzard this week so there should be some prime snow frolicking days coming up.

the last two items on my list were a visit to the field museum and to go to a blackhawks game. both have been postponed (one due to a total fail on my part, the other completely zain's fault, or really zain's knee's fault) but by no means forgotten!

gnat appreciates german culture

apologies in advance for the poor photo quality in today's post - i gave my camera carmine II a break in favor of iphone photos, mistake!

my friends and classmates andrew and andrew are organizers of a student group called the beer appreciation club (BAC), with which i have attended many exciting beer related events. the other night i received the following email:

"Did you know that there is a direct correlation between German beer and being good at science? That's why there are so many medical eponyms named after Germans, like Alzheimer's disease and Wegener's granulomatosis. If you want to be good at science too, you should join us for delicious Teutonic food and drink at GERMAN APPRECIATION NIGHT"

because i am a lover of both science and beer, i hastily RSVP'd yes and last night headed out towards lincoln square to the chicago brauhaus - a venue chosen specifically because it offers beer in glass boots, or "bierstiefeln."

whether passing a giant boot of beer around without letting it touch the table is actually german tradition or just passed off as such by the movie beerfest i honestly do not know.

we were expecting a bar but actually found ourselves in a bavarian lodge type restaurant, replete with long tables of rowdy patrons, a live band, and adorable old guys showing off their sweet moves on the dance floor. we ate traditional (read: stereotypical) german food:

i recognized exactly zero of the varieties of beer offered, but ended up with kostritzer black bier that i really enjoyed (served in what i've only just now discovered isn't technically called a "stein" unless it's made of stoneware. thanks, wikipedia.)

whether or not this field trip has made me better at science is uncertain, but thanks to the BAC and the chicago brauhaus (including the german "microneighborhood," or really the block of north lincoln avenue on which is located) i am feeling more appreciative of german culture here in chicago.