Long time no talk…but that’s just because it’s been a long time since I’ve had consistent wi-fi.

Costa Rica has many things – lush jungles, howling monkeys, screeching frogs, crashing waves, endless palm orchards, dramatic thunderstorms – but satellite coverage when it’s cloudy?  Not so much.  So, I’ve contented myself with being on vacation and taking lots of photos.

After a week of beautifully preserved nature without crowds (besides the wedding  party for Adam’s cousin Minona and her new husband, Peter), it’s hard to get my head around the fact that tomorrow Adam and I will each be in one of the largest cities in the world…just not the same city.

As of last night, we‘d arrived in San Jose, the last stop on our Costa Rican trip and itself a bit of a culture shock.

Yesterday, we awoke to the sights and sounds of, well, howling monkeys, screeching frogs and crashing waves amidst a lush jungle on the remote, southern Osa Peninsula.  The eco-lodge El Remanso proved to be the highlight of our drive down the Pacific Coast, and I’ll be sharing it (and the whole trip) with you starting late next week.

We reached San Jose via a gorgeous but turbulent/nauseating one-hour flight from the Osa’s Puerto Jimenez airport, and after a short Nature Air van ride (with Otto the ultra-helpful driver) to our shabby downtown digs, the Hotel Don Carlos, we once again found ourselves in a land of concrete and clear-cut civilization. San Jose is full of grime, faded glory, vibrant murals, wrought iron porticoes, aggressive traffic, smokers, hagglers, and a little elegance.  It’s made for an atmosphere-readjusting transition between the back of beyond and halfway home.

Adam is headed home to Los Angeles today at a reasonable hour, and will spend the weekend throwing a tennis ball for our neglected dog.  After an easy, happy nine days of togetherness in a foreign land, I sadly won’t see his face again until next Tuesday night.

At the crack of dawn this morning I’m off to New York City and TBEX (Travel Blog Exchange), a travel bloggers’ conference that, in its second year, now has big-name sponsors like American Express, public relations agencies footing the bill for cocktail parties, and seminars on everything from monetizing blogs to shooting video to making connections with PR reps. In addition to a reunion with ¾ of my fellow #belizetrip bloggers, there’ll be almost 300 people at this shindig.

Excited to meet folks I’ve heretofore only known through blogs and social media, I feel like I’m going to cyberspace summer camp.

In New York, where I’ll be frolicking around my alma mater (NYU) and staying at the nearby Cooper Square Hotel (a building that my Aunt Lisa, an NYC local, decries as a blight on the face of historic preservation), I’ll have more wi-fi than free time…

…so, please check out my Twitter (#tbex10) and Facebook pages for updates, be sure to take a look at our photos from Costa Rica — and I’ll see you around here next week!

Travels With Two

Huge fan of Elvis Costello — couldn’t help myself with today’s title.

But to be fair, I’m talking about today’s Chelsea in New York, not 1978 in southwest London.  

One of Manhattan’s oldest neighborhoods, lower west side Chelsea has become our favorite part of the city in which to gallery hop, wander street by cobblestone street and nibble our way to happiness.  

In the mid-1700s, retired British Major Thomas Clarke named his landed estate here “Chelsea,” after a veterans’ hospital in London.  100 years later, Chelsea remained the name when the estate was sold and the neighborhood grew up around it.

Clarke’s family remained society bigwigs here well into the mid-1800s, when Clarke’s grandson, Clement Clarke Moore, became famous for penning ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas; over 100 years after his death, Moore would be honored with the creation of Clement Clarke Moore Park at 10th Avenue and 22nd Street.

In 1847, when the Hudson River Railroad sliced through Chelsea, it brought tough longshoreman and railroad workers to the neighborhood, and it’s been a long road back to gentrification.  

When I was an NYU student in the early 1990s, Chelsea was still making that transition.  I used to come here to dance with transvestites and goth kids in the legendary nightclub-in-a-church, Limelight.  But Chelsea today feels simultaneously historic, intimate, fashionable and cutting edge.  

On our last visit, we loved checking out:

The modern art at:

Jonathan LeVine Gallery
Mixed Greens
Gallery Henoch
Andrea Rosen
McKee Gallery
Leo Koenig Inc.
Sperone Westwater

Chelsea Market (75 9th Avenue b/t 15th & 16th Streets).  The fanciest food court in town, save for the the one in Grand Central Station.  Grab the best milkshake you’ve ever had at Ronnybrook Dairy or prowl through obscure Italian specialities at Buon Italia.

Tía Pol (205 Tenth Avenue near 22nd Street) A cozy, friendly tapas bar with a lovely wine list and offbeat specialties like a spread of bittersweet chocolate paired with spicy chorizo on thin slices of crusty bread.  Have a glass of cava and be sure to order the fried chickpeas.

Three Tarts (164 Ninth Avenue at 20th Street) At this gem of a sweets-and-gift shop, treat yourselves to an exquisite chocolate yumball or pick up packable souvenirs like a matchbox printed with an old map of New York.

Pictured here, the Romanesque Revival Church of the Guardian Angel (193 W. 21st Street at Tenth Avenue).

Travels With Two

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

We just got back from New York City, and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally seen Brooklyn again…for the first time since 1992.

This time around, two key things were different:

1.  Adam and I were together.
2.  No one was stabbed in front of me on the F train.

Before the day had even begun, it was a marked improvement.

Back in the early ’90s, New York could be a scary place…but Brooklyn was downright terrifying. My NYU roommate and I would often take the F train from Union Square to gray and dirty Gowanus to visit friends who lived there.  One night, a man stalked into our subway car, stabbed the hell out of the guy sitting across from us, and took off down the train like a shot.  As soon as we gave our statements to the cops, they sent us packing.  And I never went back…until this week.

The Jasper Ward House

With our friends Joe and Lucy as our guides, we actually started our Brooklyn adventure in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport.  Joe lives in Brooklyn, while his girlfriend, Lucy, lives on the Upper West Side; because they have an entire island between them, they often find themselves tourists in their own city.  South Street Seaport, with its mall shops, hotels and shipyard, is pretty darn touristy — but also a perfect jumping-off place.

We grabbed roasty lattes at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee (222 Front Street) and turned down an old, cobblestone lane called Peck Slip.  45 Peck Slip, the Jasper Ward House, straddles a trompe l’oeil of the Brooklyn Bridge and the bridge itself.  Built in 1808, this crusty piece of New York’s nautical history evokes the days when much of downtown was still under water, and when careless young men risked being shanghaied from any structure this close to the Hudson River.

On the New York Water Taxi

To get the best view of the Brooklyn Bridge both Adam and I had ever seen, we crossed the street and strolled a block of the Hudson River Park Greenway before heading past the historic shipyard to what had really drawn us here:  the New York Water Taxi.

A free service sponsored by Ikea, this big yellow ferry steers you away from the port, past Governor’s Island, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and over to the positively massive Ikea store in Brooklyn.  The ride takes about 15 minutes and showed us a side of New York we’d never seen — the industrial dockyard that helps keeps New York’s (and America’s) world of commerce afloat.

To help explain where we went once we got off the boat, here’s a map of Brooklyn.

Sign at the Red Hook Garden Pier

Off the parkway, past a few scruffy blocks of boarded-up houses, we stumbled on a great spot for brunch:  Hope & Anchor.  The service is friendly and laid back, and they offer delicious breakfast hashes, perfectly cooked eggs, homemade limeade, and the best skinny sweet potato fries I’ve ever had, anywhere.

But out the front door and down Van Brunt Street, despite a few bright spots like the cheery Baked NYC, Red Hook is a wistful place where storage units look like castles and a neighborhood park means a slab of concrete.  We weren’t tempted to linger.

Doorway in Carroll Gardens

Carroll Gardens
Now, this was more like it.  It takes a few minutes to get going, but a few blocks along/around Court Street and you at least feel like there’s some there there.

The 50s and 60s were the boom-time here, but elegant fin de siecle brownstones and treats like the Mazzola Bakery take it a long way towards adorable.  One verdant little square at the corner of Columbia and Carroll Streets bills itself, quite appropriately, as The Amazing Garden.

Joe found a few choice albums propped against a tree — Paul Simon, Brazilian jazz, and Peter and the Wolf — which spoke volumes about the well-rounded neighbors.

Cobble Hill & Boerum Hill
A blend of Chelsea, the West Village, and even, with its occasional clapboard houses, Nantucket, Boerum Hill became famous as Heath Ledger’s stomping ground.  (His former townhouse can be found at the corner of Dean and Hoyt Streets.) It’s also where our friend Joe lives, just off Smith on Pacific.

Stores on Smith are crayon-painted, street lamps are curlicued, and every couple wandering the brick-paved avenue seems more creatively put together than the next. Folks smile and say hello, as though this isn’t really New York at all.

Along Smith in Boerum Hill, we loved Soula Shoes (men & women’s shoes), Rocketship (comics & graphic novels) and One Girl Cookies (tiny little cookies, dessert bars, cupcakes, and gelato).

Smith Street in Boerum Hill

At the end of Boerum Hill, we said goodbye to Joe and Lucy…and soldiered on.

On Bedford Street in Williamsburg

Williamsburg
Leaving Park Slope, we both nearly lost the will to live trying to cross Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues to find a cab to Williamsburg.  The landscape was getting increasingly barren and the blocks endless, so we finally hailed a gypsy cab with broken door locks and the cushiest leather seats on Earth.

Our wry Indian driver delivered us to our friend David’s building on Broadway just in time to see a thin sunset from his 11th-floor roof terrace.  From on high, the neighborhood looks like an elaborate train set, save for the abandoned construction sites, impound lots, scrapyards, and off in the distance, the Manhattan skyline.  When lights began to twinkle on the Williamsburg bridge, we set off in search of books and dinner on and around Bedford Street.

We started at the ramshackle/gourmet Diner Restaurant (no tables available).  On to the Bedford Cheese Shop (pure magnificence, including local Mast Brothers chocolate), then picked up a stack of books at a literary gem, Spoonbill & Sugartown. We wrapped up the evening with a perfect steak dinner at cozy, low-lit, celebrity-sprinkled Walter Foods.

So…good night, Brooklyn.  Thanks for the chance to visit you in a new era.  I wouldn’t say you’ve entirely transitioned from an ugly duckling to a swan, but we always felt safe, welcome…and satisfied.

Travels With Two