I'm at Heathrow now in an internet cafe & waiting area (£16 buys you three hours of open bar, unlimited tea and internet, and far more comfortable couches than the rest of the world--it's like buying a-la-carte access to the premiumlounges--it's named, punningly enough, the 'Holideck.'). Waiting for my flight to Copenhagen.
The flight over was uneventful and fast--we got in an hour early, which just meant six hours to kill at Heathrow rather than five. It's very strange that London is closer to New York than Seattle or Los Angeles is. I fly to LA all the time in little 5-seats-across planes, while all the international flights are Big Deals, with passports and ten-seats-across and similar.
Heathrow is a hypnotic, strange, endless stream of consumerism filled with oddly loud boarding announcements for Dubai and Mozambique... I felt, almost, an urge to buy Thomas Pink shirts (cheaper than high street prices!) and silk scarves and wallets and camera cases and ...
... and then sanity kicked in, so I found this nice quiet place, and tucked myself away. (Heathrow has other quiet places, too, but they have far less comfortable chairs: I almost want to phootgraph the ways that people reshape their comfort area, by pulling them about and stacking furniture and carry-on bags to make themselves, somehow, fit.)
(I still may. It's a kind of William Whyte thing.)
My trip so far has managed to hit Washington DC, Philadelphia for an afternoon, and Brighton Beach for a morning.
(more below...)
Brighton Beach is an interesting place. It's the next neighborhood down from Coney Island--the old Brooklyn (New York) boardwalk and amusement park. The Coney Island boardwalk continues down, but Brighton has always been an 'end of the subway line' sort of place.
In the turn of the last century, it was a Jewish immigrant area; over time, the Jewish families prospered and--like all other immigrants--moved to the suburbs. The area was in serious decline in the 70s, until it was resettled by new Russian immigrants through the 80s and 90s. It's now home to open-air marketplaces, stores with signs in Russian (and, as often as not, without English).
And a great many restaurants serving pierogies, including two named Tatiana's within a block of each other. They are both places that look out across the boardwalk, and turn into nightclubs late at night with wall displays of bottles of strong drink. Indeed, the answering machine message for one beings with 'Thank you for calling Tatiana's, where the vodka flows like the mighty Volga.'
We held a family gathering there, with cousins coming in from their various outer-New York reaches: New Jersey, Long Island, Philadelphia, Manhattan. We went easy on the flowing vodka, but the gathering was rather nice still: a delightful send-off before a few weeks of travel. More here as I get it--but don't expect any photos until my return.
September 20, 2004 05:04 AM | TrackBack | in Travelogue