501 Places

We counted over 100 restaurants within 10 minutes walk of our appartment, serving over 20 ethnic types of food. New places would spring up regularly, and it was clear that those who were damned by criticism didn’t survive long. So which were my favourites? We spent a year on the Upper East Side in 2003/04, and took every chance to eat out and experience the types of food we wouldn’t get at home. Here’s a selection of the places I miss, and that I would head back to on a return to NYC.

1. Curry in a Hurry  This was our favourite no-frills Indian. On the lower part of Lexington Ave, we would head down to this Indian restaurant hot-spot and invariably venture into this place. Good, fast service, great meals for under $10, and free unlimited dessert (kir, a type of rice pudding). The food was tasty and we never left hungry.

2. PongSri Thai restaurant. This was probably our absolute best restaurant in the city, and sadly we only discovered it in our final weeks. They have three places in town, and our favourite was certainly the one in Chinatown, although it is the least posh. The fried rice was the best we’ve had, and the quality in general was excellent. Again, a very no-frills place with low prices to match, and I was surprised to see that they now had a website!

3. Junior’s Diner This is something of a New York institution. A decent but unremarkable diner, but you don’t come here for a cooked breakfast. Junior’s is home to arguably the best cheesecakes in the world, and the trek to the original location in Brooklyn is worth doing for several reasons. If you are heading back to Manhattan after gorging on a giant slice of cheesecake, you will enjoy the view of the city as you walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. More importantly it will give you the chance to work off one or two of the many calories you’ve just taken in!

4. Dominick’s This was a unique eating experience. In the middle of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, this is smaller than Manhattan’s Little Italy but a lot more interesting. We were recommended Dominick’s by someone at work, and they suggested that as a white boy I should not take a walk down the street on a March evening. I grudgingly took the local advice, and we were dropped at the door by cab. Inside, the meal was fabulous. No menus – you just sit on long benches and shout out what you fancy. If it’s pizza, pasta or meat, they’ll make it. And the lack of paper extended to the bill. The waiter came up at the end and told me verbally how much, and as I had expected it was less than comparable meals in the city.
They also shared my work colleagues’ fear for our safety and had us sit inside the restaurant until the cab arrived and then had the driver escort us out. It felt like overkill, but then I can’t claim to know the area as they do. In any case, a great meal!

5. Little Poland In need of Polish food, I stumbled across this place early on on the lower East side and enjoyed the massive platters on offer, with no-nonsense home cooked food that left us bursting at the seams. The place had the feel of a workers’ cafe, and the staff were polite but stern. If you want high carbs quickly in Manhattan, come here!

6. Christina’s In the Polish enclave of Greenpoint in Brooklyn, this was everything that Little Poland wasn’t. Modern, well-lit, full of families and service from young smartly dressed waitresses, with equally good food. the added benefit for me was the chance to wander through the local shops and buy a range of Polish ingredients that were unavailable to us even in the UK.

7. L’Ecole This French culinary school served gourmet meals at a fraction of the prices you would normally pay. Cooked for and waited upon by students of the school, the quality for us was better than many restaurants we have enjoyed where we have paid four times as much. The food tastes sweeter when you have a bargain!

8. Le Pain Quotidien We have found this chain spring up all over London too, but our first venture here was on the Upper East Side. Seated on long benches, the rustic setting was enhanced by the gorgeous bread that was served, along with a chocolate nut spread that left me grinning for the rest of the day! It’s like Nutella but a whole load tastier. A great venture out for a leisurely weekend brunch.

I’ll round off with our two favourite take-outs from around the block.

9. Go Sushi At a time when sushi was rare in the UK, outside of London at least, this was our first exposure to regular Japanese food, and we couldn’t get enough. Fast service, good prices and delicious rolls made this place a big hit with us. Waiting here for food was also a great chance to see how weird our neighbours were. I sat in there once when a girl brought her giant rabbit in and casually chatted to him/her while waiting for her food.

10. Lili’s Last but not least. This noodle bar would serve us so much noodles for under $10 that the two of us would be able to eat till we were full and have lots left for lunch the next day. Sadly looking at the review it seems that people are falling out of love with Lili’s, but our memories of it were happy ones, of large bowls of hot noodles on a cold winter’s day.

I read somewhere that if you ate in a different place in New York every day, it would take around 45 years to get to every eating place in the city. We didn’t have that long, but there is no doubt you are spoilt for choice as to where to dine. I’m sure other people have hundreds of other favourites, but these are some of the places we suggest to our friends if they are visiting NY. Bon appetit!

In any other place these impressive medieval structures would attract many visitors. In Hama, around 200 km north of Damascus, they go largely unnoticed, apart from the occasional tour group passing on its way between the Syrian capital and Aleppo. Yet these giant wheels, mainly dating from the 15th century, dot the city and the banks of the Orontes river and provide a unique backdrop.

The norias, as they are called, were the ingenious way to lift the water from the Orontes river to the higher levels of the surrounding aqueducts and land. Although there were once many more, now only 17 norias survive and are in various state of disrepair.

We stopped in Hama on our way to Aleppo, and parked up our little hire car on the main road. As elsewhere in Syria we attracted some curious glances as we got out, and made our way to the river banks. Having seen the wheels in pictures beforehand I was very interested to visit this city. I found the norias to be even more impressive than expected for their size and their locations, although a little sad for their state of repair.

Hama is a nice place to pass a few hours in any case, and has a little maze of an old town; a few winding alleys that hug the western river bank. This was once a lot larger, but in the brutal government-led bombardment of 1982, later known as the Hama massacre, the old city was almost completely destroyed in a battle to flush out a rebellious group of insurgents. No evidence of this recent bloody history is seen, and any mention of the subject is strictly taboo in Syria.

We wandered into a big old house that is now a restaurant and enjoyed a big lunch. Clearly geared up for passing tourists they even produced an English menu for us.

It was only a short stop before we drove on to the Dead Cities of the north (a series of long abandoned settlements – but that will make another post!) Hama is a good stopping point if you are passing through, and without doubt the site of a set of unique historical attractions.

As someone who has not surfed or snow boarded, the chance to do just that in the middle of the desert was too good to pass by. At a rest stop at an oasis on the four day drive south from Lima, we saw the enormous dunes of the Nazca desert, and were tempted by the young entrepreneurs who had pulled out a selection of surf boards, at a place that felt a world away from the nearest wave.

Armed with our boards and a plastic bag full of wax, we headed up the steep dune. It was mid-day and the sand was hot to the touch, even on the soles of our feet. The march up the hill must have taken half an hour, and by the top I had sweated so much that I don’t know if the wax was surplus to requirements!

Once at the top our small group was instructed to wax our boards (a intricate process of splitting the bag of wax and wiping it all over the board) and away we went!

I tried to stand on the board at first, and failed miserably, almost before I started. I soon took the advice of our guide, who suggested we should just lie on our bellies and enjoy the ride.

This technique, although supremely ungraceful, meant that I could stay on the board as it careered down the slope, gaining speed very rapidly! I waited till the last moment before rolling off (I didn’t fancy hitting the waters of the oasis at very high speed) and eventually came to a stop, covered in sand and apparently with a giant grin on my face.

It was short (especially the downhill part) but hugely exciting, and I would recommend it to anyone who gets the chance to try it. One word of warning though – I was picking out sand from everywhere (and I mean everywhere!) for days after this adventure.

For the third post in our My Home Pride series we are pleased to have travel writer and author Andy Hayes, sharing his love of Amsterdam and giving us an insight into the city and its people that takes us beneath its better-known surface.

 
I wasn’t born in Amsterdam, nor is Dutch my native language. But Amsterdam is my spiritual home; a place which found me and in which I found myself. I don’t live there now, but it is the place I think of when homesick or where certain sights, sounds, and smells bring back memories.

A Land in the Diminuitive

Apologies in advance for the brief grammar lesson. The Dutch language has an interesting aspect to it – the diminutive. This is a way to decline nouns in a way that in English we would translate as “smaller.” So, for example the Dutch word for a table is different to the word for a “small table.” In many cases, especially in Amsterdam slang, nobody even uses the normal word and they always say the smaller version.

Now, an outsider might not find this at all surprising, the Netherlands being such a tiny country. However, it goes much deeper, as “small” infects so many aspects of Amsterdam life, and not always in bad ways. Floating along the canals in a friend’s “small” boat is an experience not to be missed. Locals prefer to linger in tiny, quirky cafes and drink several rounds of smaller-sized drinks, as opposed to the massive glasses served up in the UK.

In summary, the way I like to look at it is to compare Amsterdam life to a meal of tapas. It’s a place best enjoyed with a small sample of a little bit of everything. It’s all good and you don’t want to miss at least a taste!

 
Gezellig – an un-translatable word

Again, touching on the Dutch language, we find another interesting word: gezellig. The Dutch say it is un-translatable, although many an expat will tell you that it means “cosy.” Well, I’m here to tell you that cosy just doesn’t cut it.“Cosy Amsterdam” is something much more. Consider:

• Does cosy explain how relaxing on a Saturday evening in your favourite pub, a tiny little place with dust on the centuries old chandelier, while dance tunes quietly thump from the speakers and artisanal beers come fresh from the tap over conversations with your best mates?

• Does cosy explain how drifting down the canals in the heat of an Amsterdam summer as the world drifts by, not a care in the world?

• Does cosy explain the feeling you have while sitting under the stars, enjoying the best Indonesian food outside of Indonesia and canal reflections in either direction?

Amsterdam is a quirky, weird place. People are abrupt and speak their mind quickly.It’s kind of crowded. Everyone cycles everywhere and just getting on a bike is a death wish if you’re not in tune with the flow of traffic. But once you understand it, it gets under your skin, and you’ll realise why it’s not just cosy…it’s gezellig. A way of life.

But what about that other stuff?

Oh, you mean the marijuana bars, the endless rows of prostitutes, the noise and dirt, the loud and obnoxious drunks?    Well, yes, they’re there, but thankfully people that are into all that tend to stay in their own little corner. As a local, you’ll find yourself never venturing through the red light district with exception to check out a new hidden restaurant or a quick drink with a visitor.

That’s the funny thing about it. Everyone has this party-paradise vision of Amsterdam, and my view couldn’t be further from the truth. Relaxing cycle rides along countryside bike paths, picnics and getting burnt in the sunshine, amazing meals out from some of Europe’s best chefs.

That’s my Amsterdam.

Andy is a published author and well-respected travel writer.  Leaving behind the trials and tribulations of sunny Amsterdam, he now is based in Edinburgh, Scotland — just as gezellig but not as flat.  Read more of his travels on his website, Sharing Travel Experiences  and connect with him on Twitter.

Following the recent post in the Europe A La Carte blog on the subject of visiting Auschwitz, I stopped to think about my experiences of visiting places where disasters had occurred or horrendous acts had been commited. I have previously seen another Nazi concentration camp in Austria, visited a number of famous prisons (as described in a previous 501 Places post) including a visit to Nelson Mandela’s cell, and will later this year visit the killing fields of Cambodia and take an active interest in the bloody history of this place. I am not alone; when visitors came to stay with us in New York, no-one left without asking to see the site of the World Trade Center.

So why this interest in visiting these sites of horror or terror? Is there an important role played by sensing for oneself the sights and sounds from these places? Is it just a morbid fascination, no different from the thousands who rushed to the coast in Belgium to see the half-sunk ferry that killed so many in the 1980s, or those who flocked to Lockerbie and swamped the little village following the bombing of flight 103, or even the “rubberneckers” who create havoc on the motorways by slowing down to take a look at the accident wreckage on the other side?

No-one would accuse people of anything unseemly when they visit the war graves of the Somme in northern Europe, or the sites of Civil War battles, both in the US and the UK. Rightly so, many people feel a connection to the past when visiting these sites, and they are able to understand a little more about the places where these events occurred (often now peaceful, desolate fields in the countryside). For some, it is the site where their grandparents or great-grandparents fought and fell. For others it is a personal hobby; a subject in which they have an interest and so they use the visit to enrich the images that they have built up through reading. But just what makes the past our past, and is it right for people to treat these places as a tourist attraction (Auschwitz tours in Krakow are sold alongside trips to the mountains and white water rafting days)?

My view is that visiting sites of historical importance is vital to keep the memory of what happened in these places alive. To us as individuals, the places teach us the horrors that men can heap on other men, in the name of religion, race or ideology. It shows us the results of intolerance, of hatred and of unchecked tyranny. Walking through the war cemeteries that we see all over the world, lined by row upon row of grave stones, or in many places giant mass graves, only the hardest of hearts can fail to be moved by the loss to a generation, to a nation and to so many individual families that occurred when these people lost their lives.

I recently heard Martin Bell, the journalist and independent politician, remark on the fact that the Labour government of 2003 was the first in the UK not to have a member of the cabinet who had not served in armed conflict. He wondered about the significance of this when considering the speed with which our country dived into the war in Iraq. It makes sense that the further removed people in power are from the human costs of war, the less these very real consequences will come into their decision making processes.

I feel that by visiting the battlefield sites of the Somme, or the Nazi concentration camps, or even recent memorials to the horrors that took place in New York or London, people can at some level acknowledge not only the truth of the awful events that occurred, but also see the consequences of war and terrorism. (I draw a strong line between visiting sites such as those mentioned, where formal memorials have been established for people to pay respects, and those car and bus loads of insensitive people who drove to the English village of Soham where a horrific child murder had just taken place -what were they thinking of?)

In a generation where most people’s experience of war is limited to watching fictional American films about Vietnam or worse still computer games, these places of memorium at or near the sites of past atrocities, whether recent or distant, serve a permanent reminder of the horrors that the world has seen. They will sadly not prevent horrors from re-occurring, but they might just help to educate the next generations of the costs that are associated with man’s inability to live in peace.