Staring At The Sea

After a couple post-Euro weeks in NYC, I headed up to Maine to spend a week at my dad’s cottage in Ocean Point. It’s rare that I get to spend time there in the summer as I’m usually working, so I made sure to take advantage of the opportunity. I ended up spending 5 nights there by myself, mostly focused on gorging on local delicacies, watching Red Sox games and enjoying the lack of city noise. I spent a good bit of time advancing my first tour as a production manager. I won’t bore you with what that means, suffice to say it involves lots of emails and excel spreadsheets. It also involves getting paid more, which I like. It was one of the most relaxing weeks I’ve had in ages. The tourist season hadn’t really arrived and the solitude felt particularly good after life in Alphabet City. I got 2 lobsters one day for lunch and got so much meat out of them that I had a big pile of lobster meat to use the next day for breakfast. Nothing wrong with a lobster, avocado & Grafton 4-year cheddar scramble to start your day. In keeping with the theme of overdoing local eats, I made a tasty dinner one night of broiled haddock (the best whitefish there is) and fiddleheads. I also consumed approximately 2 gallons of chowder over the course of the week. If you’ve never had seafood in Maine, you don’t know shit about seafood. And with that, I’ll leave you with pictures of food.

Cloistered

In an effort to actually leave my neighborhood and see some more of the city, I set out one day to check out the Cloisters. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but the website told me it was the medieval wing of the Metropolitan. It also told me that it's way the hell uptown. I took the 'A' train (cue Duke Ellington) to 190th st and made the 10 minute walk north through a very hilly Fort Tryon park. It was a pretty stellar day, a bit too hot in the sun but nice in the shade.
I followed the signs and found myself high on a ridge overlooking the Westside highway, Hudson river and the vast forests of North Jersey. The Cloisters is a museum where the building itself is part of the exhibit. There were all sorts of arches, doorways and well...cloisters built into the larger building (the link explains it better and more thoroughly). The building and gardens were smaller than I expected, but it was pretty amazing. If it wasn't for the sound of the highway, you could pretend you were in 15th century France. Well, I could anyway. Medieval art has never been something I knew or cared too much about, but the stuff they had was pretty awe inspiring. It was mostly religious artifacts with a lot of super ornate bowls & goblets. It's all pretty pointless to try and describe and most of it didn't photograph well, but I highly recommend it as a New York activity.