Weekend of March 17-18: Benjamin

Being my last visitor (I'm leaving New York end of next week), Ben came over to New York for 3 days. He basically had two things on his list that he wanted to do (besides having a good time of course); one being the MoMA (which was closed last time he was here) & the second being the Frick Collection (which I hadn"t visited until now, so that came in handy). A heavy blizzard swept over New York on Friday. Ben arrived at the WTC subway station and I went to pick him up, the short walk became a painful experience as the fierce hail came down by the cubic meter.


We booked in an Indian restaurant in the Village (called Surya) but unfortunately we arrived a little too early so we went searching for a nearby bar. As it turned out, very nice piano bar was just around the corner. Having ordered a couple of beers, I tried to take a picture of the bar and was refused to do so by an over-protective waiter. Not quite understanding why this was not allowed, we asked one of the guys sitting at the bar whether he knew the reason why this was a picture-free environment, only to find out that the bar was apparently a well-known gay bar & that they had had some problems before with tourists thinking this was an attraction similar to the Empire State Building... Anyway, the restaurant experience was once again splendid (for which thanks Ben!).

Saturday was spent walking through the city (stumbling accidentally onto the Saint-Patrick's day parade), visiting MoMA, Central Park & Upper West Side. Some colleagues had recently cited Grimaldi's for serving the best pizza's in New York, so we decided we should give it a try. We took the Brooklyn Bridge (instead of taking the subway), which gave me the opportunity to take pictures with my newly-bought tripod, and found the restaurant actually being in the shadow of the bridge. Nothing has been exaggerated about this restaurant; great quantities, superb quality & low-low prices. The view over Manhattan is fantastic. My orientation ability however failed when trying to find a taxi that could bring us back home, forcing us to walk around the area for around 30 minutes before actually coming accross an empty yellow-cab.

We closed the weekend on Sunday with a visit to the Frick Collection (an art collection amassed by steel-barron Henry Clay Frick in the early 20th century), with a walk from Union Square to the Mexican restaurant on 8th Avenue where we had reservations (and where we happened to be served by an extremely nervous waitress for whom it was her first day on the job [she poured an entire beer over the table instead of in our glasses]), with a couple of drinks in the famous 230 Fifth Avenue rooftop bar & with an endless discussion about which companies add value to society and which companies just profit from market inefficiencies....