Day 16 - Thursday, July 18, 2019
It is a grey morning, tiny droplets falling on my head, the cold breeze against my face. I walk to the station and make my way to Plymouth Church School, for my scheduled flower arranging class with "Bloom Again Brooklyn”. I thought i was walking into a class where I will gain some flower design/arranging skills but to my surprise, the organisation was a volunteer service that prepares flower deliveries to Brooklyn’s senior centre’s and nursing homes. The flowers were in abundance, all sorts, beautiful and blooming. They were either refurbished or donated flowers and my job was to prepare bouquets and help with the initial set-up and clean-up of the day’s flower arranging session. The morning was slow for me, as I walked everything was grey and then suddenly I found myself in a long hall of the church filled with colour - what a therapeutic way to start my day - I thought to myself and began.
Chinatown food tour on foot with Cory was scheduled after, the drizzle had subsided and it was not meant to pour till later that afternoon. Abbie thought it was a great way for me to understand and compare Flushing’s to Manhattan Chinatown - and I agree cannot be a better way to do it than to do it through food. The tour began at the Chinatown information booth on Canal between Baxter and Mulberry Streets, it was meant to cover approximately 1.5 miles, that we would have covered in 2 hours, right in time before rainfall.
Cory began the tour by giving us a brief background and explained the development of the SoHo area, also known as Chinatown. There are 10 Chinatowns in New York - 6,000 Chinese restaurants, that are more in number than fast food restaurants found. The area is generally very busy with a lot of tourists and locals walking around, but since the weather was grey, the chances of rain had decreased the number of people that day greatly. He talked about the immigrants of that area, starting from the Italians and moving to the Chinese, the background behind ‘Little Italy’ and ‘Chinatown’ - the relevance of the history of the space, its culture and food, made the experience personal.
The first stop, ‘TenRen’s Tea Time’, our stop to experience bubble tea, for those who hadn’t. The Second stop, ‘Tasty Dumplings’, he gave us a brief history on dumplings, that in Chinese which later in Japan became famous, are known as “Jioza”, which is originally referred to as “tender ear”, mostly because of the way dumplings are wrapped and folded. However, ‘Tasty Dumplings’ were not the best I have had, the skin was too thick, for my liking but shrimp and chives was good to eat either way. The third spot was “21 Shanghai”, soup dumplings, that looked amazing and everyone had great things to say - but sadly I don’t do pork, so I passed on the opportunity. The fourth spot was ‘Mei Lai Wah Coffee’, Cory told us about the amazing buns and I went ahead and tried the coconut bun, which, had coconut and sugar in the centre, it was amazing, the hit the spot for my sweet craving that was followed by the dumplings I had earlier. The last spot was ‘The Original Chinatown Ice Cream Factory’, that was right across from ‘Mei Lai Wah Coffee’ shop, it is one of the oldest ice cream shops that have put many other similar shops in the area close down and a run for their money.
Cory’s food tour was great and very informative. If I am to compare the two ChinaTowns, Flushings and Manhattan, I felt even though Flushings in fairly newer, more authentic, in its flavour and the experience. I would definitely recommend that everyone should at least make one stop to Flushings to experience it for themselves.
The tour was over, and I waited for the weather to settle in and went back to my apartment, some shelter from the storm that was predicted. I was hoping everything would settle by evening, and so it had, I went later to watch this amazing immersive staging experience at the Flea Theater. The Other Side Of Silence (TOSOS), New York City’s longest-producing LGTBQ+ theater company, presented ‘Merril Mushroom’s Bar Dykes’, directed by Virginia Baeta and Mark Finely. It was based in the Deep South and New York City in the pre-Stonewall era, that transported the audience into a hidden subculture of lesbian society in mid-century America, and into the women and their relationships in a precarious time.
