nawl

I walked for two hours this morning in the humidity and haze. The streets around here are clearly not actually meant for pedestrians. Sidewalks cut in and out, disappearing into overgrown grass or piles of rubble. But it's a nice day, and the long walk is good for thinking. There aren't really many other humans out, just cars.

Down one particular stretch of road, no fewer than three cars honked at me, and when I looked up in each case I watched the driver's head swing around as he passed to get a 180 degree view of me walking along. The last guy actually pulled into a parking lot ahead of me and waited at the exit, staring as I walked past in front of him, then continued back on his way. Further on, a young man on foot approached me. "Excuse me, you're very beautiful. From your head down to your toes, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Hi, my name's Abraham. What's yours? You're so beautiful. It's a pleasure to meet you, bye."

I probably walked twenty miles in the past few days.

Saturday in New York, where we went not for any particular reason, just because it's comforting to be somewhere where everything you need is within walking distance. There are people everywhere, and shops to poke your head into, and restaurants of every imaginable ethnicity to stop at when you get hungry. I found a French bookstore, Librairie de France, but was disappointed with the selection. So I bought books from Barnes and Noble, which always makes me feel sort of dirty for not patronizing an independent bookstore (and besides, they always manage to be enormous and *still* not have the books I'm looking for). My picks off of the display table were unintentionally Hunter-themed: Kitchen Confidential, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Pity that as far as I know the friends who will get the joke only skim this occasionally. So we read in Central Park, and watched the fireflies come out at dusk, and I ate an enormous late-night bowl of vegetarian pho.

We tried to go to a movie on Sunday night, but the online map was misleading, and so we ended up taking a three-hour hike through a deserted light-industrial wasteland of wide lawns and warehouses and driveways and delivery trucks lined up along the edge of the road. There were some early fireworks visible in the distance. If things had gone according to plan, it would have taken the same amount of time to take the train to New York and see the movie there. On that thought, my monthly transit pass in Budapest cost less than two round-trip train tickets to New York.

Monday was another hike through New York, this time up Broadway. We found the Strand, an enormous used book store, and Chinatown, and Little Italy, where they had closed off a street so tourists could wander freely and eat their enormous plates of pasta at sidewalk tables. Then through the housing projects, which after the last six months look like nothing so much as brown brick Communist-style block-of-flats. We watched the fireworks standing on a separator wall overlooking a highway along the river, next to a wisecracking couple having a meta-conversation about the ritual of staring at brightly-colored explosives to celebrate your country.