SIGHTINGS

More reminders that, yup, I'm in NYC.

A 3.5 hour wait at the Soho Apple Store for service, along with 55 other people in queue. I pity the folks who work the Genius Bar there.

To reward myself for that long and arduous experience, I went to a spot that Hua put me up on: NYC Icy. They don't really serve the conventional "scrape and lick" Italian ices I'm used to but something that is basically a water-based gelato. Best thing ever.

With a pina colada icy in hand, I stroll up Avenue C and pass three Haitian women on stroller patrol with the whitest babies you've ever seen, one of them a pair of twins. Ah, the joys of third world labor and white, middle class privilege. I think, "at least these kids can never say they never met a black person before."

I also stop by the Turntable Lab store on E.7th and kick it with Bogdan, one of the cooler record store folks you'll ever meet. His Hot Breath mix-CD is the hotness - dope European, Latin, Brazilian, Cuban, etc. jazz, bossa, funk, etc.

I had dinner with my friend Mel and her friend Annette, the latter whom works at Urban Glass (as recently featured on Queer Eye) and is married to the head night-chef instructor at the FCI. We stop by the Institute's restaurant, L'Ecole after dinner and it turns out that Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude are dining there (Annette says they're regulars). I've never seen either before but it's not that hard to pick them out: the guy I had pegged for Christo just LOOKS the part and my intuition proves correct. For Jeanne-Claude, I choose the woman with flaming orange hair (but it helped that I read that detail in the recent New Yorker profile on the couple).