I Ate a Pineapple Pork Bun in New York City and I Think I Will Never Be The Same Again

If you thought that bad weather would keep the tourists inside, you would be wrong. We will see all the sights in New York City no matter how cold it is!

We got so turned around attempting to find the right subway line to get us to Brooklyn that we ended up near Rockefeller Plaza, so we figured that we might as well walk over and see if the tree was still up.

It was!

And then the big kid saw the line to get into FAO Schwartz and was all, "Toys?!? TOYS!!!", so somehow we ended up doing that, too.

Of course, as soon as we got into the store and she realized that it was essentially just a mass of wall-to-wall people she wanted to immediately bail, but I said, "Come on, we're already in. Might as well power through."

The first week in January is actually a terrible time to visit FAO Schwartz regardless of the crowds--they were so picked over from holiday shopping, I guess, that although all the shelves were full, they were full with just, like, one or two products per brand, basically. Great if you want a goat cheese Jellycat or a Schleich brachiosaurus painted to look like it works there (which, okay, is kind of cute...)--

--but I kind of wanted to look at *all* the Jellycats, you know? Not just 1,000 copies of the worst one.

Whatever. At least it was warm inside, and it turned out that the subway station we wanted was right near there, after all!

On to DUMBO!

Technically, all people actually wanted to do on this day was walk around Chinatown and eat stuff. But I tacked on first walking across the Brooklyn Bridge TO Chinatown because, come on, it's RIGHT THERE!, and then, well, I tacked on first finding that one perfect photo spot that everybody goes to in DUMBO because if you're at the Brooklyn Bridge, well, then... I mean come on, it's RIGHT THERE!

Just us and 1,000 other tourists seeing the sights!

If you look veeeery closely at the photo below, you can even see a tiny Statue of Liberty. We really saw everything on this trip!

There she is again! 

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge probably isn't something I need to do again, although I would like to catch a sunrise there, but it was a super easy and pleasant walk that puts you right into an interesting part of Lower Manhattan, a short walk from Wall Street on one side and Chinatown on the other.

We chose Chinatown!

And yes, I did force us a few blocks out of our way just so I could embody that Lumineers song.

It is SO hard for me to narrow down all the places I want to see when I visit somewhere:

But we did our best!

We bought buns and milk tea from Mei Lai Wah--

--and I need to tell you that this pineapple pork bun is the best thing that I have ever eaten in my life:

How do they make that crunchy pineapple topping? It was super crunchy, but it wasn't super sweet so it's not sugar. It was SO good, and I am devastated that I'm not eating it again right now.

We had no organized plan for what little shops and restaurants from my map we actually hit and in what order, so we got a lot of sightseeing done simply by wandering back and forth and around and around doing and seeing everything in the most inefficient manner possible:

Jin Mei Dumplings, cash only and window service only, but you get 15 delicious dumplings for $5!!!

I didn't see a tenth of what I wanted to see by the time we absolutely had to head out, which is always the way, sigh, and I guess it leaves plenty of reasons to come back one day.

Another place I'm coming back to: Madison Square Garden, where I once again managed to score the absolute worst seats in the house!

This game ended up being kind of heartbreaking, because I had to watch Shesterkin get injured (and he's still not back!), and then go on to watch the Rangers flat-out lose to the Mammoth, but at least they scored a couple of points in the meantime--

Here's a spot that I haven't yet made it to even once: the Empire State Building! I just like to look at it from the outside and imagine King Kong climbing it:

Fun fact: the best part of our trip is yet to come!

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Day 1 for the Most Touristy Tourist Who Ever Toured Around New York City

Because I'm a tourist, so why wouldn't I visit the tourist amenities that were created for me?

Such as...

Times Square!

Like yes, obviously, Times Square is not any tourist's *favorite* place, but eh. I've never been hassled or hustled there, it's got places to sit so you can contemplate your next move and/or your life in general, everyone else is also a tourist so I'm not in anybody's way when I stand and gawk gormlessly at a huge ad, you don't have to watch out for traffic, we saw some people attempting to film a music video in the middle of all the chaos and that was pretty entertaining, and while my partner and I stood in line at the TKTS booth the kids wandered in and out of the big touristy stores and kept bringing us little Hershey bars they said the store gave out for free but honestly I wouldn't be surprised to learn they'd simply nabbed them. 

This day on Times Square was especially cool because the detritus of New Year's Eve was still apparent:

Did you know that the Times Square New Year's Eve ball is a legacy of the same type of time ball that we saw in Greenwich? So cool!

The ball is a LOT smaller than it looks on TV...

Anyway, our hotel was actually just a couple of blocks from Times Square, so we wandered through there a LOT:

I'd never done the TKTS booth before, and I was pretty amused to discover that reps from the different shows work the line while you wait, talking up their various productions. I was dithering between The Outsiders and Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), but even though I know people have been loooooving The Outsiders I'm partial to original shows so I chose Two Strangers. And omg I am SO glad that I did!

But first, bagels!

Then, a bookstore!

The Drama Book Shop was on my want-to-visit list just because of this amazing sculptural piece that was even more impressive in person, but I also found the script for Ada and the Engine and a book about the making of Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus Christ Superstar was my first musical, if you count watching the movie version on cable a billion times (which I do!), and now I'm obsessed with musicals, so there you go. Ada and the Engine is a play that I dragged both kids to a few years ago after we'd done a unit on the history of computers, and it also has a surprising and shockingly touching musical component. 

This trip to New York City has a theme, it seems!

Would you even be in New York City if you didn't spend some time each day wandering around lost?

Also see: wandering around looking for a drugstore because one of you might have just come down with that adenovirus that's been all over the news, and then sitting in the middle of Times Square and dosing yourself up on Mucinex and Robitussin and a cough drop in each cheek. 

Fortunately, I also packed plenty of masks. I *have* been to New York City in winter before!

Hadestown is the musical I'm most obsessed with, and honestly, it was KILLING me not to be in this line:

But it's okay, because I was across the street in THIS line!

I walked into this musical completely cold--I hadn't even paid attention to the promoters working the TKTS line. All I knew was that it was 1) indeed a musical, and 2) comedic. 

This is the set:

Dudes, this musical was AWESOME! It was hilarious, which serves to distract you so they can also sneak a bunch of feelings up on you, and the songs were great, and the actors were amazing. 

And if you sit in the first two rows they throw movie props at you!

One night my partner ran out to a shop, and he swears that they had one of these props taped up behind the cash register with a sign telling the cashiers to watch out for "counterfeit bills," lol. 

SUCH a good play.

Afterwards, the big kid and I stayed to stagedoor Two Strangers, while the little kid and my partner ran back to the hotel for her copy of Six of Crows, then hopped across the street to stagedoor Hadestown, because IYKYK!

Alas, Jack Wolfe didn't appear (although they did get to see Kurt Elling!)--

--but both Sam Tutty and Phoenix Best came out to the Two Strangers stagedoor, so the big kid and I got signed playbills. I told Sam Tutty that this was the big kid's first Broadway show, and he told her that this was his first Broadway show, too, which was pretty adorable.

Also VERY modest, because he's genuinely West End famous and this is simply his first time on this side of the Atlantic.

I wonder if he ever hangs out with the other genuinely West End famous actor who works across the street?

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I Alphabetized All The Jailed Authors At The Kurt Vonnegut Museum

I really fell down on exposing the kids to modern American literature in high school (although my coverage of esoteric ancient texts, gothic horror, and Greek mythology was exceptional, ahem), up to and including neglecting to have them read anything by our very own local son, Kurt Vonnegut.

Even more of a shame, because they would have loved Cat's Cradle, for instance, and Slaughterhouse-Five would have been an excellent supplement to a World War II study. Although only the older kid really dipped back into modern history in high school (we studied modern history very extensively in middle school, so the younger kid still knows about Hitler and AIDS and the Berlin Wall and all the important stuff!), and she still jokes about our "fun Mommy/daughter" date with popcorn and cookies and hot chocolate... and Schindler's List, yikes. I'll be minding my own business cross-stitching on the couch, and suddenly she'll be all, "Hey, remember that time we watched that heartwarming drama about found family in beautiful, war-torn Poland? I'm definitely not still traumatized!"

Sorry, I guess, but being traumatized by Schindler's List is how you know you're not a sociopath!

Anyway, the kids and I were BIG field trippers, so the only way I hadn't visited the Kurt Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis before was that I fell down on my duty to provide my children with their full component of modern literature to study.

However, both my partner and I, for various reasons, read plenty of Kurt Vonnegut for our sins while we were in college, and so a few weeks ago we took ourselves on our own field trip to the museum.

I do think this museum is best appreciated if you're familiar with at least some of Vonnegut's work, so it was well-suited for our own little Saturday morning date of wandering around and reading labels and looking at interesting stuff. And there's an extra fun looky-loo aspect when you're both local!

As in, I am OBVIOUSLY going to drive by these houses!

Because I'm literally that nosy I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out where Kurt Vonnegut Sr. moved to in his final years, since the place was apparently just the next county over from me, and thus even more driveable for my looky-loo nosy self, but everything in Brown County is so middle-of-the-woods and also middle-of-nowhere that I couldn't work it out.

Oh, well, current residents of the house that Kurt Vonnegut Sr. lived in at the end of his life, you can mark yourselves safe from me driving slowly past your home and gawping... at least for now.

There weren't a ton of personal artifacts of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s own, but there were a few precious and interesting objects:

I WOULD like to show the kids that course schedule! They go through agonies each semester getting their schedules finalized, and somehow they always manage to make it my problem, too. One kid's school has them register in waves, so you get a Round 1, from which you're guaranteed to get at least two of your four picks but you probably won't get all of them, and then by the time Round 2 rolls around all the good classes are full. The other kid's school lets them put their complete schedule into a "shopping cart," and then they run a lottery for every class that's overenrolled, so she'll be minding her own business trying to study for finals and get an email telling her that she lost the lottery for her most-anticipated class and so got dropped from it, and then three days later she'll get an email saying she was dropped from her next most-anticipated class, and she'll have to wait until the day before classes actually start next semester to scramble for open classes with the other unlucky kids.

When their dad and I were in college, we stood in line to meet with the registrar, and during that meeting we worked out every single aspect of our schedule, alternate classes and all, so that when we walked out fifteen minutes later we, just like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. up there, had our final schedule in our hands. IT WAS FAR SUPERIOR!

I thought this was an interesting display, in that it makes overt a gap in our understanding of Vonnegut's life, caused by the fact that nobody was taking photos of the help:

It's sort of like those who did the real labor of keeping house and caring for the children are the equivalent of ephemera, utilitarian and constant on a day-to-day level, but rarely valued enough to keep. It's crazy how quickly knowledge is lost when it's not carefully preserved.

A large part of the museum was devoted to the Dresden bombing and Slaughterhouse-Five:

This is the most viscerally upsetting of Vonnegut's novels, and I'd been prepared to see upsetting images and displays, but it was pretty visually gentle. I think this was the only actual artifact--

--although many of Vonnegut's quotes were highlighted:

I'm impressed with Vonnegut's processing of his war-related trauma, and I wonder what combination of his personal characteristics made him able to do that? My Pappa very rarely spoke about his part in the war, until he finally grew so old that I guess the memories eventually lost some of their bite and he was able to relate some very disturbing stories that I'd never heard before. Even with everything that he wrote, I wonder if Vonnegut also had war stories so disturbing that he never told them?

Here was another good artifact--evidence of a writer's life!

The museum has also recreated Vonnegut's habitual writing set-up, in case you, too, want to try your hand at the most ergonomically incorrect situation possible. Dude wrote in a low-slung easy chair pulled up next to an honest-to-god coffee table that had his typewriter sitting on it! You'd write your ass off just for the pleasure of getting up and stretching your spine out once you hit your word count!

I really like it when writers are Virginia Woof's idea of "writers-of-all-trades," so I thought it was interesting to see that Vonnegut also turned his mind towards song lyrics at least once, as well as writing an exceptionally charming note to the singers:

My search for that song led me down a rabbit trail of discovery, and I'm delight to tell you that Vonnegut himself recorded versions of some of his books on genuine vinyl record albums, and those albums are now on Spotify!

This introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, read by the author, is absolutely brilliant:

Is his authorial voice exactly how he spoke, or did he read his work so wonderfully that it feels like he was simply speaking it impromptu?

Spotify also has this exact album whose cover I photographed because it cracked me up:

Vonnegut SINGS on this album!

My latest Spotify Wrapped was messed up because I sometimes listen to podcasts in the middle of the night to help me fall back asleep, and then those podcasts just keep playing softly under my pillow for the next four hours. So excuse me for a few moments while I go make myself a Kurt Vonnegut playlist for future bouts of insomnia...

Other large parts of the museum were focused on the importance of the arts--

I should make a quilt that has a favorite book quote on it, because this is beautiful!

--and on the issue of banned books. As part of that exhibit, I think, or at least tangential to it, was my favorite display in the museum, this one on authors who have been jailed:

I should probably confess that these books were not arranged alpha by author, with their spines tidily aligned with the edge of the shelf, when I arrived... but they were when I left!

The display was really cleverly created by putting the information about each author's jail experience on a bookmark in that book, and I read every. Single. One! They were also hilariously non-discriminating about circumstance. Authors who were wrongly jailed for things that shouldn't have been crimes, like Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela, and Daniel Defoe--

--were right up in there with authors who full-on murdered people!?!

Okay, I looked this up, and it's pretty crazy. The murder of Honorah Parker sounds devastating, and I can't imagine what it would have been like at the time, knowing that a couple of teenaged girls brutally murdered one of their perfectly nice and perfectly normal mothers like it was nothing. People only found out about Anne Perry's history because Peter Jackson made a movie version of it which got journalists interested in finding out what happened to the murderers. It seems like both women did their jail time, were rehabilitated, and led solitary and upstanding lives afterwards. A career writing murder mysteries is a choice, but I guess your brain wants to write what your brain wants to write. 

Anyway, that information was so wild that afterwards my partner and I had to go and eat Korean barbeque about it:

And yes, I DID just request a few of Anne Perry's Christmas mysteries from my local public library. Just because I've smashed my 2025 reading goal (108 books read of my goal of 104!) doesn't mean that I can't still get festive!

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