New York Mice Have Good Taste
Posted by Moose on July 11th, 2006. Filed under: Travel.Unable to go anywhere without junk food, we packed two bags of Cheetos, one bag of gummy bears, one tube of fruit gems, two bags of peanuts, one package of cookies and one concentrated dose of “How can you eat all this crap and remain so damn skinny while I increasingly resemble a walking potato chip?” for our three day trip to New York. The second night, we hear a rustling in the snacks bag. The kind of rustling you don’t want to hear in a hotel in New York. Especially a hotel that you booked before reading the internet reviews that proclaimed “nice bed, but the rodents were kind of disturbing.”
No one can say I don’t know how to plan a good trip.
After investigating the bag and realizing that it was devoid of furry creatures, hallucination seemed the least disquieting explanation and we went back to sleep. Only to later discover that the bag had some very suspicious looking holes. We were forced to face the obvious: mice had gnawed at our Cheetos.
I’m proud to say that we ate them anyway.
Rodent molested snacks and fried mayonnaise was not all we ate this weekend. (Note: just because a restaurant serves cubes of fried mayonnaise with beef tongue does not mean you should eat there.) I devoured lemon ricotta pancakes at Sarabeth’s, cupcakes at Magnolia and tasty steak at Balthazar. In spite of the fact that my stomach would not allow one more morsel of food to be digested without some very unpleasant consequences, I refused to relinquish the steak. The waiter had to promise to (quickly) return with the uneaten portion before I would loosen my grubby talons from the plate. Then I kept the doggy bag unrefrigerated in our hotel room for two days before packing it into a suitcase. I will finish that steak. It was at Balthazar that we had a prime New York moment:
“Am I hallucinating, or is that Ralph Fiennes sitting at the table next to us?”
“Who?”
“Ralph Fiennes! From Oscar and Lucinda! That one with Julianne Moore! Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter, for god’s sake! THAT Ralph Fiennes!”
Blank stare.
“Dude. This is totally wasted on you. Wasted!”
But not wasted on me. I gawked in what my tipsy brain assured me was a very subtle way, because I used to live in New York and using both eyes to stare would be beneath me.
Before leaving on this jaunt, I reiterated many times that I am the worst tour guide ever. I wanted there to be no mistake in the matter so no one would be surprised when we accidentally ended up in a borough. (Yes, we did. Still not sure how. We didn’t really get clued in until the train went above ground and we saw that we were on a bridge, travelling over a body of water. Oops.)
But we still managed to find Central Park, several Broadway shows, the Met, and Ralph Fiennes. And the shopping.
I restrained myself quite admirably as we passed through Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, the East Village and the West Village. Only occasionally would I break from my spirited discourse about the importance of dwarf horses in ancient Chinese philosophy to plaster myself to a store window. The haughty expressions of the sales women in Christian Louboutin only cracked slightly in revulsion at the misshapen face pressed against their spotless glass before quickly locking the door. I disappeared into BCBG – the siren call of 70 percent off was too heady to ignore – but I covered four floors in under 10 minutes. My walking companion wasn’t even restive by the time I emerged.
I didn’t truly crack until Soho. We were prancing merrily along, debating the merits of large sunglasses and how the return of the mirrored aviator glasses will signal the fall of western civilization (He’s straight, I swear. Pay no attention to the prancing.), when I dropped my thought midsentence and, distracted by the shiny, hightailed it straight toward the shoes. I have coveted these shoes with the same rabid obsessiveness that makes me refuse to spend more than $100 on a pair of shoes. A pair of shoes that you can’t even eat. This presents a problem, as the salespeople get miffed when you try to walk out with shoes you haven’t paid for. I was just planning to drool for a few minutes, until I was reminded that I have a birthday coming up and a certain someone hadn’t really shopped for me yet. So maybe I should choose myself a little something.
Is this the mother of all win-wins, or what? He gets to shimmy around on the weird mushroom shaped cushions, freed of the dreaded task of gift shopping, and I get to choose myself a pair of shoes that I DON’T EVEN HAVE TO FEEL GUILTY ABOUT. Talk about scoring the points.
Here they are. Our relationship moved quickly from “You’re cute” to “Want to come home with me?” to “I will never let you out of my sight, ever again, because I love you that much”:
This picture was actually taken in my house, totally cheating in my official New York post, but I was too lazy to remove the camera from my purse for most of the trip. Even though the digital camera fairies magically replaced my LCD screen before we left, I have no real photographic evidence.
My feet are pictured in our house, and not on the front sidewalk where I feared we would spend last night, because it’s apparently quite easy to get into our house without a key. If anyone wants to borrow a sweater or steal a spatula, it’s remarkably easy. We discovered this at 2:30 a.m. this morning when we realized that we had either 1. neglected to bring keys, 2. left said keys somewhere in New York, or 3. the mouse had eaten them, along with half the Cheetos.
Related posts:
