Under the Baobab Tree

Restaurant Week

This week is Restaurant Week in New York. So after my deposition on Wednesday, I hit the pavement with a couple of people I went to law school with. It was a long and ugly night -- punctuated by realizing about seven times that I had lost either my scarf or my redweld of discarded deposition exhibits or both. Each time, someone appeared out of nowhere and found all my missing accoutrements for me. And they say New Yorkers aren't friendly...

The evening started at a place a block from our NY firm -- Judson's Grill -- which was fun though hazardous because everyone's firms are nearby and the chances of being seen by someone you are trying to avoid are high. We moved on, several hours later, to a Latin bistro in Soho, which may have been called Ideya, where I ate lamb and polenta. I think it was on West Broadway. I wasn't paying very close attention by this time. It was marvelous. My dinner companions included not only my law school friend but three funny Australian women who thought New York was just incredibly funny and couldn't believe that a place like it really exists in the world. They all tried to convince me to move back. There reasons ranged from the serious to the silly. On the serious side was the obvious point that "the pay is better here." On the silly side was "we have better buildings. Just look at them." The person who said this waved her hand vaguely out the taxi window as we drove back up to mid-town after dinner. The whole time it was snowing -- it probably snowed for 12 hours straight on Wednesday in New York.

The morning after our impromptu celebration of Restaurant Week, I had to get up shockingly early to get the train back to DC. I cursed Restaurant Week all they down to the station. The snow had stopped and it was a beautifully sunny but freezing morning. I wandered out on the street to get coffee and a bagel and to fill my wallet up with the cash that had disappeared out of it the night before. It was bitterly cold. Then I tried to get a cab. They were all full -- it was rush hour -- I stood in the driving wind with my scarf and coat blowing all around cursing Restaurant Week even more. Finally a cab stopped. As I got in I realized that I had just spent .25 hours standing on 7th Avenue clutching a coffee cup, frowning, and talking to myself. In any other city I would have been hauled away to the loony bin.

I slept the whole way back on the train. Outside it was beautiful. There was about 4 inches of snow covering everything from NYC down to Wilmington. There was snow on every branch, and even sitting on the heads of the marsh grass in the Meadowlands. It was lovely. I was in the quiet car on the Acela, and when I wasn't asleep I gazed placidly out the window at the snow, in total silence. It was like the last scene in the Unbearable Lightness of Being.

posted by Anonymous @ 11:36 PM 0 comments

The Frozen North, Major League Baseball, and Alice in Wonderland

I spent the afternoon on the 3 p.m. Acela to New York today. I love the Acela. So much more comfortable than an airplane.

Items of note:

1. Every body of water between Washington and New York is frozen. This includes the Anacostia River, the Severn River, the Susquehanna River, the Delaware Bay, the Schuykill River, the river in Trenton (whatever it is), the Passaic (or is it Secaucus?) River, and the Meadowlands. I'm told the Hudson has chunks of ice in it but I couldn't tell because I was underneath the river in the tunnel.

2. I sat next to the nicest man on the Acela. He was a very mild-mannered public relations man who is working as part of the team trying to bring Major League Baseball to the DC area. He was on the phone the whole time telling his team that whoever they are presenting to tomorrow in NYC are not interested in power points, or any multimedia show, just the cold hard facts and maybe some briefing books. This endeared him to me. I ended up with his card and a promise of free baseball tickets if he succeeds in bringing a team to DC. It occurred to me that it might also result in some work for the firm...

3. On the subway from Penn Station to my hotel a saw the beautiful Alice in Wonderland mosaic on the walls of the 50th street 1 train station. It's so beautiful -- like an Arthur Rackham silhouette in gold and yellow tiles.

4. Then I noticed for the first time that the Columbus Circle station has architectural medallions of a boat that looks suspiciously like the one Columbus himself arrived in. Though it could also be Henry Hudson's boat, or Peter Minuit's, I suppose.

I am in the same hotel as always, the Essex House on Central Park South. I plan to order room service and hit the Heavenly Bed (the ONLY reason to stay in a Westin). Although first I'm going to hit the town with my old college buddies.

I love New York. Every time I come back here I wonder why I ever left.... Maybe I should just stay... No-one would ever notice....

posted by Anonymous @ 9:00 AM 0 comments

Phun in Phoenix

Last night I had an absolutely hysterical dinner with a colleague and our client contact in the legal department.

We drove way out of Phoenix, practically to Scottsdale, to eat in this magical place on the grounds of the Royal Palm hotel. We drove past the Camelback Mountain -- which is a big hill that looks like a side view of a camel sitting in the sand. There is a camel hump, and then a swooping curve thing that looks like the camel's neck, and then a bunch of rocks that look like the camel's head and its nose drooping into the sand. The Phoenician resort is in the foothills of the Camelback Mountain. There are many $6 and $8 million homes.

The atmosphere out at Camelback is so mellow it makes you feel sort of loopy. Our restaurant was tucked away under palm trees, in lush gardens, with gurgling ponds and warm red tiles and mosaic little bar tables and warm wood rafters and the smell of mesquite everywhere and a big bocci court under the stars and the moon and the palm trees and the weird, unidentifiable trees and men that looked like they might be hacienda-owners or gauchos drinking expensive liquers at the bar that was under a low hung roof and had giant comfy chairs and wooden book shelves bulging with books and maybe you might see Ernest Hemingway in the corner smoking a pipe and all the while outside it smelled bizarre but in a good way -- like a yummy sausage frying in a pan with chocolate and honey and all the rest of your favorite foods. We had to wait for a table so the three of us flopped down in the comfy chairs by the overstuffed bookhsleves and were immediately prone with our jaws hanging down completely engulfed in thoughts of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. We were shattered with exhaustion from the stress of the day. We were so blotto on the chairs that we started to giggle, first individually and then as a group. The evening went downhill from there.

We were eventually seated in a room with hideous paintings of old people. It turns out that the portraits were all of members of the same family, and when the owner of the portraits had died he had bequeathed that whoever bought the portraits must promise to always keep them together in the same room. So there they all hung together -- only a painting of Byron had crept in as well. We examined our maitre d' on why Byron was among this ugly family and the maitre d' concluded we were nuts and refused to answer. Grr.

Then the menus arrived. I was immediately fascinated by an entry that said, "Open face Arizona shrimp ravioli." What could it possibly be? I've never seen a shrimp with a face...Arizona doesn't have a "face," really, either. And if shrimps have faces, have I been eating closed-faced shrimps all these years? Maybe some hyphens were missing? I asked the waiter what "open face Arizona shrimps" were. He said, "they come from the Arizona coast, a shrimp farm." I obviously must have been looking incredibly dumb at this point, because the guy finally explained that it was the raviolis that were open faced, not the shrimp.

All this time, my colleague was complaining that he couldn't see the menu very well. He claimed it was too dark (it wasn't). I asked him if he had left his glasses at home. he said, "I don't wear glasses -- I have perfect vision." This becomes important later.

After the client and I ordered, my colleague proceeded to order what struck me as a preposterously huge meal -- the paella entree AND the red snapper entree. His exact words were, "I'll start with the paella and then I'll have the red snapper." I held my tongue, not wanting to be rude. Wow, who could eat that much? When the paella arrived, my colleague said "My GOD! This is HUGE! This doesn't look like an appetizer size! I assume I will only be charged for the appetizer?" The waiter looked confused, and said, "sir, we don't HAVE an appetizer size of the paella. We had sort of wondered why you ordered so much food...." We all collapsed -- everyone started laughing -- all the other patrons, the serving staff, the maitre d'. Everyone. Turns out my colleague had mis-read the "antipasta" appetizer as paella. The restaurant was so amused it gave us the paella for free.

Then, much later in the meal, we were drinking coffee. My colleague had an espresso. It came with an espresso cookie, which was very brittle and dense. My colleague took a bite out of the cookie. I heard a loud SNAP -- almost a POP. There was a moment of calm. Then after a second of slow-motion delay, my client convulsed in her chair, looking shocked, perplexed, her head pitched forward, then thrown back in an effort at self-control. She came to an upright position, looked pained, as if struck by a pistol shot, and looked at us. My colleague said, "did something hit you?" There was a moment of silence. My colleague said, "it wasn't, no -- not, no! was it part of my espresso cookie?" It was. That was the end of us. We doubled over in laughter. We couldn't finish our meal. We laughed so hard no noises came out of us. We drove all the other patrons in that section of the restuarant away.

Today was a much more subdued day. I spent the day in client interviews. My colleague did the same. We had breakfast and lunch without any giggling. He went and got on his plane back to DC. The only vestige of our terribly humorous night before was that the client showed up with a very small band-aid on her cheek -- over the spot where the espresso cookie had hit her. It was a joke, of course, but on occassion throughout the day one of the three of us would turn toward the wall and sit and silently sob with laughter about the open faced shrimp, the paella, the projectile cookie...

In more substantive news, Phoenix today was covered in imprenetrable, cloaking fog. Unheard of. I might as well have been in San Francisco. I'm told by the Legal Department here that this is the first time in 5 years that there has been fog in Phoenix. Also, the pouring rain yesterday was the first rain here in 2 years. Weird.
Tomorrow I get to drive down to the Mexican border and don a hard hat, steel-toed boots, and gloves, and go poking around an abandoned company town near the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument called Ajo. My Fodor's guide tells me Ajo is the Spanish word for garlic. How many of you think that's accurate?

posted by Anonymous @ 10:41 PM 0 comments

Mineral Mecca

Here I am in Phoenix. It has poured rain since I got here. The city got .41 inches of rain today and the locals are hopping around doing a rain dance they're so happy. I am not amused. I didn't even bring an umbrella or coat on this trip because it was supposed to be 75 and sunny. I brought sunscreen instead.

Phoenix it totally flat, there aren't very many building, and the streets are laid out on a grid. As a result, it's totally disorienting. And since it's been cloudy all day it's taken me almost all day to figure out which way is north. In fact, I was five minutes late for my meeting because I went the wrong way.

But then I got to my meeting and I was suddenly in a WONDERLAND! My meetings this week are all at Phelps Dodge and the corporate headquarters is a Mineral Mecca. In the lobby, the have a huge wall of feldspar (so I was told) with blasting grooves in it. The reception desk has a receptacle in it filled with beautiful minerals (you're not allowed to call them rocks). The countertops are black marble or onyx or something with copper flecks in it. The outside of the building is a copper sheath. The square it's on downtown is called Copper Square. The floor that houses the Legal Department has a stunning collection of minerals in a glass case -- malachite, azurite, etc. There is a grand stairway linking every floor that is open from bottom to top (bad for people afraid of heights, like me) and up one side if the feldspar wall with blasting grooves and up the other side are these beautiful mosaics made from minerals, like porphry, malachite, something gold, copper, all kinds of things. It's beautiful. The floor that houses the executive front office has a huge display of fabulous specimens, some of which you can see the gasses bubbling out. The azurite is shockingly blue -- it's amazing. There's a specimen with azurite and malachite combined. The Board table has copper flecks in it. There's a copper sample turning green before your very eyes. There's some wild white thing with spikes shooting up. The whole thing blew me away.

There's also an elborate western saddle outside the board room, but no-one could tell me why. It's right next to the portraits of Mr. Phelps and Mr. Dodge. Also, there are huge murals of open pit mines, mine tunnels, mine trucks, etc., everywhere. Everyehere you turned there would be some new form of rock/mineral incorporated into the architecture.

From the windows you get a 360 degree view of Phoenix. You can see Squaw Peak mountain, the airport, Lookout Mountain preserve, Papago mountain, South mountain, etc.

I would like to live inside the Phelps Dodge building.

I also learned a few interesting things about Phoenix:

1. It did not exist at all in any way whatsoever, not even as an intersection or a tent, until 1870.
2. No-one liked it here until the 1950s, when air-conditioning became affordable.
3. A long time ago the land Phoenix sit on was riddled with 300 miles of canals dug by the Hokoham Indians. Then they gave up and went away and the Pima and Maricopa Indians moved in and planted corn.
4. The first white men to set up shop anywhere near here were Union soldiers in the Civil War who built Fort McDowell east of Scottsdale. They reopened the old Hohokam canals.
5. Copper and cows run this place.

posted by Anonymous @ 11:08 PM 0 comments