January + February 2022
Life
I spent most of January at home recharging, wary of the Omicron wave. Despite this, NYC continued to operate like pre-Omicron; during the peak in early January, I went into the city to meet a friend and was stunned to find everything business as usual. In a week or two, Omicron left NYC in the same exponential manner as it came.
During January, I became enamored with the idea of buying an apartment in NYC. My main motivation was along the lines of why pay rent when you can pay for your own place instead?. I developed a brief yet intense pastime of browsing StreetEasy for potential apartments, sort of like you how you would browse aimlessly in online shopping. I visited a handful of apartments in Brooklyn and also quite a few in the only tall building in my neighborhood (if you’re wondering it has 18 floors but only 2 elevators, which makes waiting for an elevator notably slow). However, I soon realized that this was a bad idea - buying a unit would tie me down to the city, owning instead of renting would comes with its baggages, I’d have to pay an arm and a leg for a mortgage, and on top of that the taxes + fees alone were already basically half my rent. I gave up the search soon after, wondering why I even wasted so much time considering this idea.
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| Some of the largest Corinthian columns in the world at The National Building Museum |
At the end of January, I was ready to go somewhere again. Still wary of getting COVID from a plane, I took the Amtrak one Friday night after work and was in Washington DC in 3-ish hours. DC is a city you probably can’t cover in a weekend, and I only had a day and a half. The Smithsonian museums alone can make it an engaging week-long trip, and then you have to count in all the other cool museums, memorials, and others. This time, I opted to visit three less popular museums that I had never been before: the National Building Museum, the Hirshorn Modern Art Museum, and the National Archives.
The National Building Museum is highly recommendable to even the most casual architecture fan: it’s housed in the grandiose Pension Bureau building (an agency discontinued in 1932), and hosts a diverse yet engaging selection of exhibits from the impact of the US-Mexican border wall to the photography of buildings. The coolest thing about the Hirshorn museum is that it’s designed like a ring with a large open-air courtyard, creating these journeyed and immersive exhibits as you travel along the outer circle. Lastly, the National Archives is known for one thing - where the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights reside. The script on each is now quite faded and the documents are notably well protected; I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many guards looking after a single artifact in any other museum. Wouldn’t want a National Treasure situation, I suppose.
On the way back from DC, I stopped by Harpers Ferry (notably without the apostrophe, at least since 1890) in West Virginia and learned a little about John Brown’s slave rebellion right before the Civil War. It’s a small historic town that’s kept its 19th century look; very few people live there today.
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| Trains on display at the Roundhouse in the B&O museum. The large turntable in the center was used to rotate trains to position them on any of the tracks. |
Two weeks later, I took another Amtrak trip down the Northeast corridor, this time to Baltimore. For a city known for its seafood the seafood was a bit underwhelming, but perhaps it’s because classic American cooking doesn’t really know how to cook seafood except frying it or steaming it. In fact, the best food I had in Baltimore were these authentic tacos at Clavel, nixtamalization process and all. I also must recommend Dutch Courage, a bar that specializes in gin drinks - I’ve been tinkering around to reverse engineer their Japanese Breakfast, a cocktail containing chartreuse, yuzu marmalade, and Sichuan peppercorn.
Aside from food, the B&O railroad museum (the B stands for Baltimore) was a historic and comprehensive display of locomotives from the early 19th century to the late 20th – you could even go on quite a few of them. The National Aquarium was also pretty epic, showing off many diverse micro-habitats. My only gripe was that it was a little too crowded with families making a day trip from Washington DC. On the way back, I stopped in Wilmington to tick off Delaware - a truly boring city with most of its businesses closed on Sunday – before heading back to NYC.
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| One Vanderbilt |
A friend came to visit in late February for a week. We dented our wallets trying quite a few restaurants on my saved list, and saw a Brooklyn Nets game that they convincingly lost with Patty Mills as their #1 option. We also went up 1 Vanderbilt at night – a special, artsy, and futuristic skyscraper experience that I would add to any NYC sightseeing tour. In addition to floor-ceiling windows, there’s a room with mirrors on the floor that creates beautiful “mirror-ceptions”, and another with plenty of floating ‘balls’ to play with as if you were in space.
And then I got COVID.
Food
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| Galbi & Chan course at Jua |
- Onion tagliatelle at I Sodi (New York, NY): this dish singlehandedly made the restaurant 5 stars. It’s so simple, consisting only of four ingredients with onion, olive oil, cheese, and salt. Yet, the sweet earthy flavor of deliciously caramelized onion is immense and lasts throughout the bite. The bite is deeply satisfying, removing any desire for meat.
- Marea (New York, NY): Marea is known for its excellent Italian seafood (and it is indeed excellent), but I also had my favorite tiramisu there. The cake by itself was fairly run of the mill, a little on the drier end but with a heavenly mascarpone mousse cream. However, the side pieces were chosen to resemble a second tiramisu in flavor but vary wildly in textures: mascarpone ice cream, cocoa crumble, and espresso sabayon. When had together, each of the flavors becomes doubly emphasized while a choir of textures sing.
- Frozen Yogurt at Olmsted (New York, NY): a simple dessert with just 2 ingredients, frozen yogurt and honey cream with a meringue-like consistency. Both were in a state between solid and liquid such that it didn’t mix. The dish exhibited contrast in hot vs cold, sour vs sweet, and tangy vs ‘woody’. When you have them together, their textures are separate, but this is ephemeral as they soon melt and come together dissonantly.
- Carbone (New York, NY): Carbone is special; it has a fancy old-school Italian American vibe with some of the tastiest Americanized pastas I’ve had. The pastas are a comfort food: the sauces are rave-worthy yet at the same time familiar in flavor, striking a heartfelt chord.
- The Modern (New York, NY): an impeccable restaurant with some controlled creativity within the realms of French contemporary. A couple of dishes like the hamachi + Celtuce or citrus soufflé feature some ingenious combinations to make it truly special. The eggs on eggs on eggs dish is a raw unfettered expression of the richness of eggs: each bite bursts in umami from a combination of creamy poached egg, yolk, and caviar.
- Rose’s Luxury (Washington DC): Rose’s Luxury is the pinnacle of new American cuisine. Unlike fine-dining, the food isn’t challenging and the environment isn’t snobbish; instead each dish was creative yet agreeable, and the service was very genuine. As a solo diner you get the ability to try a tasting menu, each dish with diverse influences and a joy to have, for an honest 85 dollars. Like a true American restaurant, there was a soda pairing with the fried whole (!) dover sole (!!) and a hearty of serving dessert that I didn’t have the space to finish.
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| The receipt for Rose’s Luxury |
Misc
The Northeast has pretty decent train coverage, at least coming from the West Coast where there’d be like 1 train per day. Along the Northeast corridor, the frequency is convenient (more than once per hour) and delays aren’t common. It’s just a shame that it isn’t faster - it takes about as long to drive as to take the train.
The B in B&O Railroad stands for Baltimore, but do you know what the O stands for?
Eastern religions focus on transforming the energy of negative emotions into positive ones; Western religions focus on suppressing bad emotions and sins.
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| Supreme is not the only player in the luxury brick market |
The Rubin lab has an awesome exhibit in which a brief mist of a particular smell is sprayed to the ‘viewer’. It then asks you what emotions the smell triggers, before revealing the back story that is special to the artist who created it. One of the samples was a Thai laundry detergent, which reminds the artist of his last summer with his mother before she passed away. Some found the smell to be peaceful, but others found it to be confusing or repelling. This makes me wonder what smells evoke nostalgia for me, but there probably isn’t even an easy way for me to index this. Side note, it’s probably the first time I’ve seen smell used as a medium for art.
The prices in DC are easily 30% lower than NYC.
A candle topper may possibly be the most useless but coolest thing I purchased this year. It spins due to convection from hot air when the candle burns.
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| Has technology gone too far?? |
I finally saw someone pee on the subway. He did it in a corner of the car.
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| In front of the first sweetgreen, near Georgetown |