a little seedy

A couple of days ago I visited Hicksville. 43 miles (69 km) towards the city on the Long Island Express Way. I was on a shopping mission, but not for a cowboy hat, as the locality might suggest. My mission was to obtain spices. In order to expand our regular diet away from pasta with red sauce, an eastern Long Island staple, I had to travel. Over the last decade or so Hicksville has established itself as a centre of Indian culture on Long Island. If you want to buy a sari, colourful Indian sweets or coriander seed, Hicksville is the place (the only place?). My exploration of the main road included shopping at three different stores, and I am sure there are more. One of them, Patel Plaza, is a fully fledged supermarket, with an entire aisle of lentils and related things, and another of rice. All in massive bags of course. My newly aquired spice collection suddenly expanded from the previously aquired pepper, salt, crushed chilli and bay leaves to include coriander, fennel, fenugreek, nutmeg, black pepper, cloves, mustard and cumin seeds, ground cinnamon, tumeric, paprika and amchoor, and cinnamon sticks. Anyone for curry?

diner dining

It's a sunny Saturday morning, perfect for going out for breakfast. Feeling virtuous and ready for pancakes after my (short) run we headed up to the highway to Johnny's Diner. Having only seen the place from the outside I had no idea what to expect. And after a very disappointing pub experience last night (outside promising, inside horrible, service with a scowl) my expectations were, well, shall we say neutral. The gravel car park was busy, and on opening the door, the place was packed. But before I had a chance to turn around and depart, we were shown to a space at the counter that seemed to magically appear, and stools were arranged (I was asked whether I preferred to sit close to Wayne or keep a bit of distance). A cheery good morning from the waitress, some menus appeared, and we were having our first local diner experience. My pancakes and Wayne's omelette with fried potatoes (yum!) were served within minutes. The action behind the counter was impressive, 6 people working in a very narrow space, serving, washing, cooking, making coffee. At least half the customers that arrived while we were there were known by name by the staff. Food good, atmosphere great, staff super friendly. We will be going back to Johnny's.

drinking and driving

Week one of work over, so it's time for some weekend exploring. High on the list is checking out some of the local microbreweries to test the truth of the phrase "America: Worst beers in the world, and best beers in the world". Greenport on the north fork of Long Island (http://tinyurl.com/27s58jd) is home to the Greenport Harbor Brewery. They have a small bar/tasting room where you buy a glass, and they give you a 4 oz sample of each of their tap beers. They're not allowed to actually operate as a bar. Takeaways are in 64 oz flagons known locally as growlers. Their beers include a pale ale, an amber ale, a porter, and IPA and a Belgian style ale. The winter highlight will be the porter, but given that it's summer time, the IPA is the choice of beer to fill our shiny new growler. The north fork of Long Island is also home to a lot of wineries, so I expect there will be a trip or two back to the area. It's also a major agricultural area for Long Island. Fields of corn lined long sections of the roads in the area. So to start to answer the original question, they certainly do have some very fine beers here. Testing of the bad end of the equation started on Saturday evening with a sampling of Bud Regular. At least it wasn't Bud Light. It should be renamed Bud Average. Or Bud Ordinary. Or Dud.

Cars are a fact of life on Long Island. Many roads don't have footpaths. Every single shop, no matter how small, has a number of car parks. People will drive between shops within a single shopping centre. Bikes pretty much don't exist on the roads, and when they are there, they're often being ridden on the wrong side of the road, without helmets. Scary! So we have to get a car. There's a shortage of Moon Buggies over here (although I have seen one Camry wagon of a similar vintage), so we came up with a shortlist of possible cars. Criteria were: small (ruling out pretty much every American car), hatch/wagon (ruling out just about everything else), not white (so we can find it when it snows) and with something less that 100000 miles on it (we are getting picky!). So, meet Joan, our shiny new (well, 2002) VW Jetta wagon. The New York DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) has a complex system of identification required before we can register a car in our name. Six points of identification are required, and we're sitting (un)happily on five points, waiting for either a social security card, or a power bill, or a pay slip to arrive. So, in the meantime, Joan's previous owners were kind enough to drive her over to our place and then remove the plates, effectively deregistering it until we can sufficiently identify ourselves. Which will happen hopefully in the next couple of days.

cruising around

We have been here a week now. Wayne started work on Monday. I’ve been spending the days exploring a fair chunk of eastern Long Island seeking out essential things, like an Asian grocer. It’s been quite warm, and humid, with a few impressive thunderstorms. You can spend the days being serenaded by the icecream truck, which does seemingly endless loops around the neighbourhood. It doesn’t play Greensleeves though, so I haven’t been sent insane (yet). My first victory against the bureaucracy was getting myself a library card without the ‘proper’ ID. A small victory, for sure, but I’ll take it.

One of the challenges here will be trying to not become totally car dependent. There are buses and trains here, but the ‘one an hour or less’ frequency leaves something to be desired. And the over 2 mile walk to the station is not great if you are short of time. There is also not a lot of incentive for people to look for transport alternatives when the roads are huge, the traffic light, and, you do almost need a car to get from one side of the shopping plaza to the other (and binoculars to see what shops are over there!). At the moment we have a rental car, a black New York gangster cruiser style (a Chevy copy of the Chrysler PT cruiser?). Anyway, it impressed the boys hanging out at the local shops. But having just one car means that at the moment I am driving Wayne to work and picking him up again in the afternoon. Very strange situation!

Our aquatic transport (AKA garden ornament).

Our jetty is used by seagulls as a picnic table. They are much larger than Australian seagulls, and they eat crabs, not chips and leftover sandwiches. They don’t eat the shells though, so the jetty becomes littered with crab remains. The other main ‘seabird’ around here (so far) are white swans. A group of about six half grown, but still downy, cygnets came cruising by this morning. Very cute.

Gardening has begun. We are on a half acre block, so I’ve never had so much dirt to dig in. If all goes to plan we should be eating a wide variety of leafy green things, herbs and tomatoes in August. And you can even water gardens here, there are no water restrictions (although perhaps there should be!).

moving in, moving out

It’s just our third day in New York, but it feels like much longer than that. Today we moved into our house in Mastic, and I am looking out across the estuary as I type.

The house from the front is not all that much to look at.

From the back, however, things get a little more interesting.

As it turns out, Saturday is a good day to move if you want to pick up some random extra things, as Saturday is yard sale day. It would seem that the thing to do in summer is move out a bunch of stuff into your front yard and try and sell it. Everyone’s doing it – we found 6 sales within just a few miles without trying hard. Of course, it’s hard to find everything on your list, but we did OK. Unused yoga set, wooden picture frame, shower tidy, cutlery tray, vase and a bread maker. And a novel, “The girls guide to hunting and fishing,” which I thought sounded like essential ready for this part of the world. It’s pretty warm today, so we cooled off at the iced tea and pink lemonade stand (so very Charlie Brown!).

The local Central American food store supplied us with the makings for lunch ($1 for 30 corn tortillas – yum!), then we headed out again on our mission to explore the neighbourhood and find a few essentials. So I now have a mobile phone (shock!).