After enduring 9.5 hours of holiday traffic, we’re finally back home from a whirlwind Thanksgiving weekend in New York. We started with a family gathering on Long Island, joined another feast on Friday in New Jersey, and then spent Saturday exploring our old stomping grounds in New York City.
Together we lived in NYC for eight years, moving through ten different apartments across three boroughs, before relocating south to my home state of Virginia. The only time our addresses overlapped was in Astoria, Queens — which would’ve been perfect timing if we’d known each other then and weren’t separated by two years. Small world, almost.
We took a nostalgic walk through Astoria to revisit our former apartments and to remind ourselves how lenient our standards were when we were both broke college students. I was especially taken aback by how grimy my old place looked. It’s hard to tell whether it deteriorated over the past three years or my memory had been gently polishing the past.
Sherry Was Here John Was Here
After leaving Queens, we treated ourselves to a visit to the new CB2 store in SoHo — one of our other former neighborhoods. The store had opened about three weeks earlier as the first CB2 location, so it was predictably busy. Still, it was fun to see everything in person. We exercised some restraint and left with only a few disco-ball Christmas ornaments, partly because we didn’t want to carry more purchases around the city all day.
While in SoHo we also visited the semi-new Z Gallerie store — where we picked up another ornament — and a Japanese lifestyle shop called Muji, which felt like a cross between American Apparel and Ikea. For lunch we stopped at a gourmet coffee and crepe spot called Kitchen Commune. As usual, we were more taken with the decor than the food: the giant kitchen-utensil chandelier hanging above the dining area was a highlight.
Following lunch and a brief wander through Chinatown, we rode the A train uptown to visit my sister and brother-in-law, who moved into a lovely apartment they bought last year. It was a treat to relax and admire someone else’s home improvement projects for a change. My brother-in-law Marty proudly showed the chandelier he installed to better define their dining area — a very familiar solution to us.
They found the light fixture at Lowe’s after trying a few other options, including a lamp shade from CB2 that didn’t quite work. Everyone was happy with the final look, and Marty was understandably relieved the installation was finished.
That brings our quick city visit to a close. We don’t yet know when we’ll return, but we’d love to go back when the weather is warmer and wander the streets without a heavy coat.