This weekend my mom was in town, and we decided to spend a day going to all the spots from the original (and best) rom-com When Harry Met Sally. (If the younger readers have not yet seen this movie, now is the moment!) We started at Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side then walked all the way up to 96th Street, with stops at Shakespeare & Company, Cafe Luxembourg, the “wagon wheel” apartment (iykyk), the spot where Sally buys her Christmas trees, and the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park. (The restaurant is closed, but it looks like you can still rent boats.) By that point, we had clocked exactly 13.1 miles (a half-marathon) and decided to save the Temple of Dendur at the Met for another day. It was a fantastic way to see the city with a tourist (sorry, mom!) and the pre-set itinerary and frequent stops compelled us to keep going.
In my view, there’s no better way to see a city than by walking it. Sometimes it’s not by choice, like the first month I studied abroad in Paris when the metro workers were on strike. Or during a wave of violence on the subways, I decided to walk the three hours to Brooklyn. But most days it is by choice, like a true flâneuse. As someone without a driver’s license or any aspirations to acquire one, walking has always been my favorite mode of transportation.
On our walk this weekend, we saw all sorts of sights we never would have seen if not on foot: the pharmacy depicted in a famous Edward Hopper painting, three different women wearing the Totême jacket and scarf and at least one wearing a dupe, a bald eagle clutching its lunch in the middle of Central Park (zoom in to see the too slow squirrel)…a landscape as varied as New York.
Walking is also how I get most of my inspiration for what to do in New York. My trick for discovering spots I want to visit is to pin them in my Google Maps when I walk past them, so whenever I’m back in that neighborhood and have time to stop for a coffee or pop into a store, I just pull my map up and see what’s nearby. I am not alone in this—I’ve seen some of my friends with amazing rainbows of pins. But that’s my tip of the week: take a walk and pin anything that looks interesting to come back to. And when I visit other cities, I pin places I want to go so I can easily access them when I am walking around.
P.S. My friend and I will be participating in this saunter later in the spring.
Update on the bag project: it’s a disaster!
Or so says the woman I spoke to at the Leather Spa. She didn’t even touch the leather Loewe and Longchamp bags that I sheepishly pulled out. She just took one look at them and said that they were too “vintage” (read: old) and the leather was too dry. She just looked at them, shook her head, and said, “this is a disaster.” So, I perhaps bought a few lemons. I have not completely given up hope—I’m making a last ditch effort to find a tailor/cobbler this weekend.
In better news, I scored some truly beautiful Gucci bags with bamboo handles that look to be in much better shape so hopefully I can find someone to work on them.
What’s on the bedside table
This week I’m reading Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides. Frequent readers will know I am a massive Eugenides fan (The Marriage Plot and Middlesex were both in my top five books I read last year). I’ve read his other three books (including The Virgin Suicides which was made into a great Sofia Coppola movie), so I’m rounding out his oeuvre. This is a collection of short stories. Not every story resonates, but I’m overall enjoying it. I continue to be amazed by the way he writes about the inner lives of women with such clarity, better than any other male writer I’ve read besides, perhaps, Tolstoy. I’d say read this one only if you’ve already read everything else he’s written and you still want more.