Will this heat ever end? Today it was 105 or 103, depending on who you listen to. But we had a plan. Once again, it involved scurrying from AC to AC. We started the morning by going to the bagel shop, Tal, and getting bagels and sitting there for about an hour. Then we headed out to SoHo. to check out a jewelry shop that seemed like it might be a place that would take my Babes. It so clearly wasn't that I didn't even try. John was wearing his Chalk it Up shirt (of course, since he brought at least three of them with him) and we happened upon a chalk drawing on the sidewalk, so took a picture.
It was a killer hot wait for the subway -- cars are nice and cool but the stations are hot, hot, hot. Anyway, once we were in SoHo, it was still hot, so we shopped in a lot of places we might not ordinarily shop in, athletic clothes, super expensive baby stuff, photography, and so on.
While we were walking, we heard a lot of noise and could see some giant inflatable rats down the street. By giant, I mean about 20 feet high. And there was endless noise from horns, the kind you squeeze a bulb to make a sound, whistles, etc. It turned out that this was a labor dispute about the remodeling of some building. I tried to get pictures, but could only get one rat in the picture at a time. You can see John across the street holding his ears. It was really awful. I don't leave home without earplugs so I had mine in.
We had lunch, then left SoHo, because it was just too hot to walk around shopping, even though the stores were nice and cool. Anyway, the second part of our daily plan was to see a movie that was opening today. We went to a movie that opened today. The theater was crowded and cool but not so cold I had to put a sweater on. As hot as it is outside, they can't even get buildings that cold here. Anyway, the movie, "Sarah's Key" was absolutely wonderful. It was partly in French, partly in English, and just really tugged at your heartstrings. By the end of the movie, I think half the people in the theater were crying.
The next part of our plan was to go to free night at MOMA. My god, it was a total madhouse. We stood in line for 15 minutes to check my very small backpack, one much smaller than other people were allowed to take into the museum, but I'm not pissed off about it. It was cool in there, in spite of the fact that there must have been over a thousand people in the museum. I don't think we were ever in a room with fewer than 50 people. They also didn't have much of interest there except the things I've seen there before -- the Impressionists and the Picassos and especially the four Kandinskys.
Coming home we thought we'd take the bus, but after waiting for 20 minutes, it turned out the bus we were waiting for was some fancy-schmanzy express bus that our ticket wasn't good for. While we were waiting, we noticed that one of the pedicab drivers was so busy flirting with some girls who were trying to hail a taxi that he almost got run down by the bus that wouldn't take us.
We wandered down to the next bus stop and discovered a subway station we had previously never noticed, so we took that home -- though we had to walk from Park West to Broadway. The good news was, we went past the only Cafe con Leche that's still open -- the one at our end of Amsterdam closed -- so we had a nice dinner. Plenty of fried plaintains to up our potassium.
On the way home from the restaurant we passed what you would think was a typical New York summer sight. A fire hydrant opened up. The water coming out was really cool. I was ready to totally jump in, but I restrained myself.
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