Friday, August 28, 2009

NYC - Part 7


One of the things Lars and I had both declared a MUST was a visit to Central Park Zoo. We were well aware that as zoos go it was pretty small, but that didn't matter - our love for the movie "Madagascar" meant we had to go there :)

As expected the zoo was nothing special, but we did have fun finding the lemurs, penguins and polar bears, and it was nice doing stuff together :)


Once we were done with the zoo (which didn't take all that long) we grabbed lunch and then headed off for more train-spotting/shopping. Mine ended up mostly being browsing though. I found a Swarovski boutique, but their selection wasn't all that big and Jennet and I had planned on going to the one on Rockefeller Plaza the next day anyway, so I ended up not buying anything. I wandered around town for awhile and found both the Argosy (2nd hand bookstore but neither as big nor as well stocked as the Strand, didn't tempt me for long), Pomes Frites (a restaurant with yummy french fries and probably around 20 different sauces for them - I really wanted to bring Lars there, but unfortunately that didn't happen. A shame, he'd have loved it), "Books of Wonder" (a childrens/YA bookstore - very cool! Didn't buy anything though :-/ ) and another B&N (I was looking for a specific book which - unfortunately - they didn't have, so I'll have to order it off amazon instead). I do have addresses for all of these places, but I figured that might just be superfluous information. Let me know if you'd like any of them.

I've discovered that I really miss GoodReads.com whenever I'm abroad. I see all these cool books that sound fascinating, but know I can't buy all of them, so I need somebody/something to help me decide. GoodReads does have a mobile app, but unfortunately it's too expensive to access when abroad.

This walk basically took me all over town, so my legs were screaming at me rather loudly that I should go back to the hotel and relax for awhile before dinner, which I'd decided was to be at the Brazil Grill right by the hotel.

That was probably one of the best dinners we had while in NYC :) We'd been told they had a Brazilian buffet, and asked for that, but were very confused when we discovered the buffet only sported rice, black beans (which smelled FOUL - I didn't dare taste it) and a salad bar. The restaurant had advertised 10 different kinds of meat, so we didn't know what to make of it.

While discussing it, I was playing with this weird stop-light thingie (see photo) that was standing on my table.

After a few minutes (long enough that we'd wondered if we were supposed to just go up to the buffet and start) the waiter came over, introduced himself, and asked if we'd ever tried a Brazilian buffet before? No? Well, we should just help ourselves at the salad bar, and then they would come down to the table with the meat. The stop-light thingie was to indicate whether or not we wanted more meat - as long as we left it at green, they'd keep coming, once we turned it to red, they'd know we were done.

A smart way of doing it, and the food was delicious. Well, the salad-bar was fairly standard, but the meat was well-cooked and with lots of variety. We had turkey, 2 different kinds of chicken, 3 different kinds of pork and 4 different kinds of beef. Very, very yummy and definitely a place I'd recommend to other people visiting NYC.

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