Category: MoMA

PART 3: Week 2 of exploring NYC!

The second week was my favourite – in the first week we did a lot of things that I have enjoyed since I have arrived. BUT in the second week we did stuff that I had been saving to do with this lovely lady and best friend, better known to me as “mother” 😀 .
We started our Monday by going to Grand Central, by checking out the market and the shops. I also had a hole in the sole of my left boot – I quickly realised this because of the disgusting feeling of a wet left foot, sock and inner shoe, definitely one of the more annoying and gross experiences to have.
After that we went to Harlem, Malcolm X Boulevard, to go on a walking tour. We were a bit early so we had some lunch for $6,50 at a “weigh your food” restaurant. The walking tour  was by Tours on foot and it was a really great tour with a very professional tour guide (they offer lots of pay-what-you-wish walking tours all over the city!).
For dinner we made our own special type of Taco’s with mince, cheese, Doritos and Guacamole.
Breakfast 😀
Grand Central
Grand Central
Grand Central Market
Grand Central Market
Harlem Brownstones
Walking tour!
Apollo theatre
Dinner consisted of Doritos, mince meat, guacamole and salsaaa!
We started our Tuesday by going to the famously famous Williamsburg and nearly got blown away. Unlike when Stephan and I went, we ACTUALLY found a nice street with  nice shops and nice food!
Then we hopped on the L-train and went to the Morgan Library and Museum (not allowed to take pictures inside, so now you’ll HAVE to go and check it out for yourself 🙂 ). Wow. This is a definite must see and in the same class as the Frick collection! This place was amazinggg!!
We ended our day with a quick drink and a snack at Chelsea Market and Tuesday night the lovely mamatjie slept over again because the NEXT day was my birthday!!
Really windy Williamsburg
Lunch at “Dos Toros”
Lunch at “Dos Toros”
On the G-train, on the way to Williamsburg
floors at Anthropologie
inspiration for future projects… 😀
Pre – birthday bite from Karen – really delicious and chocolatey!
Wednesday – MY BIRTHDAY –  started with a breakfast at Le Pain Quotidian with Stephan-husband & mama-Karina. The tables were also full of delicious cookies just because! (so I started my day with waaay too many cookies AND breakfast). Then we quickly stopped at 5th ave (Manhattan) again to buy a few stuff the madre wanted and then we went to the MoMA – and only had to pay $5 for my mom for a guest pass ( because I AM A MEMBER 😀 ) where we admired the Degas exhibition and we also watched the film “Where the wild things are” which was kind of not so nice and really depressing…
So to cheer ourselves up, we went for some happy hour cocktails in Park Slope before having a LOVELY AWESOME FANTASTIC dinner at “Al Di La Trattoria” :D. I am so happy to have been able to share this birthday with my husband AND my mother! I feel so lucky!
Blossoms for my birthday on Park Slope 5th avenue!
At Le Pain Quotidian
Breakfast!
More pretty flowers!
Another Ralph’s coffee
Mama and Marcel
Fig. 1
Klimt
Karina and Klimt
Mama and happy hour
Thursday 31 March we went for a looong walk in Prospect Park – there are tortoises in the lake, I found this rather intriguing – and had some coffee before heading down down down in Union Street until we reached Smith street (fun fact, if you walk up up up to the Manhattan side of Smith street, this will become Jay street and you will be at the NYU Tandon school of Engineering before you know it! And if you continue to walk/run this way even further, you will reach the Manhattan Bridge and now I will stop because the place where this bridge goes is kind of self explanatory 🙂 ) and there we found a lovely French Bistro and had some lunch. We then walked around in Brooklyn Heights (great “walking around” streets are Smith and Court street), we went to Barnes and Noble, Trader Joe’s (great place for groceries!), more “shoppietjies” (small shops, that word, if you are not Afrikaans is just a terrible mixture of English and Afrikaans just because I wanted to). A bit later we met for a quick beer and onion rings at Bare Burger in Court street – yummmmm and then we had an awfully long wait for the bus and we were late for our dinner arrangements, but everything worked out well in the end !
Blossoms in Park SLope!
Walk in the park
Walk in the park
Morning coffee
Walk to lunch
French Bistro
Bare Burger
Bare Burger
Bare Burger
Bare Burger
Bare Burger (live!) entertainment!
Bare Burger
Waaaaaiting for the bus
Dinner!
Dinner !
Dinner!
Dinner!
Dinner! 🙂
 Friday 1 April – The mother’s birthday!! We had hotel breakfast after singing for the mamatjie with a Buttermilk Bakeshop cupcake and then we went to the American Museum of Natural History . We had a special and cultural Harlem lunch at Sylvia’s – fried chicken and ribs ! And then a slice of cake for pudding at CafĂ© Lalu!! With this seriously overstuffed feeling we finished up the last things at Fifth Avenue before going home to Brooklyn and having a drink at the Oyster bar on 5th avenue in Park Slope. For dinner we went to Calexico and shared two celebratory Fajitas.
My BEAUTIFUL mama!
Waiting in line at the AMNH
With Teddy Rosevelt!
Sweet corn-bread at Sylvia’s
Sylvia’s
Sylvia’s
Sylvia’s fried chicken!
Harlem
Café Lalu
Café Lalu
Café Lalu
Café Lalu
Café Lalu
Calexico!
Pre-party at the Oyster bar
Calexico!
Hola Fajitas!! MMMmmmmm
Saturday – the sad, goodbye-saying, final visiting day – we went to Target and the lovely mother bought herself a blue Kitchen-Aid-handheld-electric-whisk, we had a drink at Gorilla coffee and we went to JFK for lunch and to hug and kiss and say goodbye. ❀ ❀
*A special note for my mother:
BAIE dankie vir die heeeeeerlike tyd mamma!! Ek’s so baie lief vir mama! Ek EN Stephan sĂȘ soooo baie dankie vir elke ete, bakkie, kossie, koffie, kuiertjie en al die liefde en die voorreg om alles te wys en te vertel! Ek hoop hierdie vul al die “blanks” in, ekt nou probeer moooi hard dink. Mams kan nog uitsien uit na ‘n “Part 4” met net nog foto’s en hopelik ‘n video of 2. Sien uit om mams gou weer te sien in Suid-Afrika of Amerika!!!

PART 1: Tour NYC like a local !

My mom came to visit us! This is my mom and I (and a brunch mimosa and Stephan who took the picture, thanks Stephan):

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During the time she was here we did a LOT of things, I know Brooklyn and Manhattan a little bit better now and I had 2 weeks to explore WITH someone!

This is how my mother and I did it. If you happen to live in Park Slope or actually anywhere in the world and you’re visiting New York, with or without your mother, here is a list to follow – *feel free to comment, or to ask opinions about the places or things we did.

I’ve divided the two weeks into two parts, part 1 contains the first week, from Friday 18 March (just so you have the timeframe, although the weather was quites strange and really not spring yet, so keep that in mind if you want to travel here in March) to Friday 25 March and part two is from Saturday 26 March until Saturday 2 April.

*I think I’d really like to become a tour guide 😀

LIST – SIMPLE STEPS TO HAVE THE ULTIMATE TIME IN NYC WITH YOUR MOTHER WHEN YOU ARE 23, MARRIED AND ON A F-2 VISA

  • Do not have job due to your visa situation – make sure your unpaid internship starts after she visited. This also ensures that you can not wait for a friend in the form of your always loving mother. (I was super excited and counted down the days 🙂 ). For example – here are a few selfies to show you how I entertained myself before she came (and you’ll be able to read all about this in the previous posts as well!).
  • IMG_6665.jpgIMG_8615.jpgIMG_8607.jpgIMG_6982.JPGHaving “alone travel time” before she comes gives you time to explore the city (reaaally a lot to explore), this ensures that your list is really long when she arrives and since this is NY, there’ll still be really a lot YOU weren’t able to get to and you’ll do it together.
  • Take the A train to the airport – this is worth it if you have time and you don’t have (any or a lot of) baggage (since I was going to get my mother I had none). It’s $7 for the air train to JFK when you reach the end of A. If you’re not going to Queens, DON’T  take the J train when going home… If you arrive at JFK rather call a taxi (if you’re going to Park Slope/ somewhere close to Park slope in Brooklyn, call Arecebo,  $40 pick-up/drop-off fare)
  • Get your mother at the airport and go home with the Arecebo car service 😀 and take a selfie in the car:IMG_8805.jpg
  • Show her around 5th Avenue and have coffee at L’Albero dei gelati:
  • Have a late St. Patrick’s dinner with your lovely and extremely hardworking Stephan husband, your mother, your housemate and her son.
  • Walk home with your mother to the cooool Airbnb place she lived for a week
  • Start Saturday with a quick walk in Prospect Park and DELICIOUS brunch at Cheryl’s:
    Mama Karina crossing the street at Grand Army Plaza
    Mama Karina STILL crossing the street at Grand Army Plaza (I took a lot of pictures 😀 )
    Two of my FAVOURITE people in Prospect Park with me!
    Brunch at Cheryl’s
    Selfie!
    Proper picture – photocred goes to the waiter.
  • Walk around Broadway, starting at Prince street and ending at Union Square
    Visit the pretty church and listen the organ concert
  •  ALWAYS go into the book stores. Especially Barnes and Noble – they might have a Georgette Heyer book !!! We also went to see a free organ concert at 16:00 in Grace church (a really very beautiful church with stained glass windows).
  • Go to the Guggenheim
    Guggenheim!
    Guggenheim selfie 😀
  • Sunday:  eat some bagels in Union square park (we fed the birds a lot of the bagels) and then, to flee the cold go to Max Brenner’s Chocolate shop and drink some Chile Hot chocolate. Go to Strand books (just across the road) and the comic bookstore next to it – it’s really good bookstores!
    Special Mexican dark chilli hot chocolate…
    ❀ ❀
    that thing is FILLED with chocolate!
    Menu at Max Brenner
    Max Brenner
    ❀
  • Walk further up up up in Broadway, go into stores and have lunch along the way until you reach Macy’s. By then we were really tired, went home for a nap and went back to 14th street to go to Redeemer Church at 17:00. After church go to Macdougal (nice historic street with LOTS of nice restaurants) and have a DELICIOUS Italian dinner, because by now your mother will be needing a good dinner and some wine 😀
    feeeeed the birds…
    A shop and some of the clothes inside
    wowie
    even more wowie
    Macy’s flower show – take note, TOO MANY PEOPLE!
    Delicious dinner!
  • Monday: Start the day by visiting the Neue Galerie and having some Klimt cake at the CafĂ© Sabarsky. It had some gold leaf and everything! Klimt would have enjoyed this!
    View from our window seat at Café Sabarsky
    Tea in a teapot!
    yay for self-timer!
    Klimt cake – with some edible gold foil and cream.
  • Then head down the road to the Metropolitan Museum, pick a specific section you want to see (otherwise you’ll never finish, rush and not be able to take anything in properly) and head there and do one unexpected turn. I find that’s the best way to see the Met with your “mammatjie” (mother but small, it’s Afrikaans o.k.). In this case we went to see the Islamic art section to look at the rugs and we also saw a special exhibition for VigĂ©e Le Brun. She was a very impressive eighteenth century female painter).
    Rug!
    Selfie on the balcony in the Met
    On the balcony in the Met
    Italian frescoes – exciting stuff for first year art history students (AND my mother was a first year art history student last year 😀 )
  • After the Met museum you’ll probably be hungry, and they have food at the Met at the cafeteria downstairs as well as the cafĂ©. But I find if you’re done in the museum anyway, you’d be able to find a nicer restaurant for the same/ a lower price. SO skip the part where you take your mother to the supermarket and you pick something and they weigh it) just head to Dumbo, to Juliana’s from the start!
    Manhattan Bridge! (DUMBO)
    Brooklyn Bridge (DUMBO)
    My Sarie Magazine – wanted to be one of those people who feature in the magazine but I never sent them the picture 😛
    Pizza at Juniana’s
  • A good way to start your Tuesday would be to head up to the Upper West Side again and go to the Ralph Lauren Woman and home flagship store (and get a free cappuccino) before going to the Frick Collection.
    Mi madre in Ralph Lauren on Madison Avenue
    Ralph Lauren
    Cappuccino!
    Frick museum (the only place in the museum where you are allowed to take pictures is in here)
    selfie!
    another selfie
    a very blurry but nice selfie…
  • Head over to Central park for a walk until you find the Boat House Express CafĂ©. You CAN go to the restaurant, I’m sure it’s very nice but if you’re on a budget the cafĂ© is great and they have small bottles of wine for $7 and they also serve burgers for $5.
    Lunch at the boathouse café
    Lunch at the boathouse café
    quick stop while walking through the park
    Bow bridge! Where Stephan and I got engaged last year!
    Bow bridge
  • **Optional: Continue to walk through the park to the other side and look for a restaurant you, your mother and sister enjoyed 3 years ago. Find it and go and look at the place Stephan is currently interning at before going to Telio, the Greek restaurant with reasonable prices, good pizza and lamb gyros.
    telio’s – we found you again!
    the view !
    failed selfie attempt
  • On a Wednesday it would be a good idea to go to the Brooklyn Botanical garden and that’s what we did just after working a while in the library (Brooklyn Public Library – great for free classes etc!) and for lunch go to Cheryl’s again. 😀
    Mama and Magnolias!!
    Magnolias!
    On the way to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
    Brooklyn Public library
    Brooklyn Botanical Garden
    Orchids!
    more Magnolias!
    Daffodil hill
    Daffodils!
    Not excited enough… see next picture 😀
    “Orchids!”
    ❀ ❀
    at Cheryl’s
  • Then just walk down Union street, have some more coffee and buy Turkey burger patties (no, don’t, because it doesn’t really taste as nice as chicken OR beef, but it’s everywhere, cheap and looked worth trying, so we tried it) and eat at home with Stephan as well.
    Coffee stop
    mural in union street
    walking through a supermarket
    Another blurry selfie – Making our own food $18 for the 3 of us – turkey burgers! (I don’t like turkey that much, I think Americans do because there is turkey everywhere)
  • Moving down a little more in 5th avenue – we looked at all of the beautifully designed window displays and we went in a t the Polo store (Ralph Lauren designes Polo) and had some coffee at Ralph’s. Another nice thing about these (out of my league) stores, is the fact that they almost always have free rest room facilities :D. Always go into Gap as well – they usually have a good special – we each got a sweater for $12 or less ( my mother’s was $7!) and a really nice scarf for $3.
  • We then met with Stephan at Eataly for lunch – I’ll have another picture update because I don’t have the nice Eataly pictures with me now).
    Macy’s again- trying to sell us stuff
    Eataly!
  • If you’re in Brooklyn and you want to see, well pretty much the ultimate supermarket (supersupermarket?) kind of like Woolworths in South Africa  but bigger, there is a ginormous Whole foods on the corner of 3rd street and 3rd avenue and I only bought a spanakopita (greek spinach and feta pie, $3,50) but it’s quite cool to just look at everything. Calexico for dinner is ALWAYS a good idea 😀 be prepared to stand in a bit of a line, it’s worth it!!
    Whole Foods
    Whole Foods
    Whole Foods
    lotssss of beer at Whole Foods
    and some more
    at Calexico
    at Calexico
    Hola! really goooood tasting food!
    On the bus to “take” the lovely mother home.
  • Start Friday morning by helping your mother pick everything up from the bnb space and take it to your own apartment before having some breakfast and spreads at Le Pain Quotidian. We especially enjoyed the little pots of coffee you get there!
    Getting the bags
    Le Pain Quotidian
    Pots of coffee!
    spreaaaads 🙂
  • We then went to the Brooklyn museum, had some lunch there and went to Ikea and took the wrong bus but saw Red Hook through the windows so it actually worked out quite well!
  • To be continued – Read about Niagara falls, Williamsburg, the Morgan Library and 2 birthdays in the next post!!!
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Hello March!

This blog update is just to fill you in on the potentially awesome things you could do in New York when you aren’t allowed to work, or at least, this is what I did in the first week of March:

Monday – I ran over Brooklyn bridge… again! (still new to me) AND I made a video about it. And I had another Spanish class. I also discovered TWO SHELVES of oboe books in the Brooklyn Public Library!!!

Tuesday – I visited the OGS (Office of Global Services at NYU) told me I am able to do internships on my F-2 visa as long as I recieve absolutely NO compensation… 😀 To celebrate, I went to the Transport museum (see pictures!) and in the evening I went to a Redeemer group and met lots of lovely new people from church.

 

Wednesday – I went to the Metropolitan Museum, did a tour about “Fashion in Art” and I also listened a free lecture about “Drawing for Portraits” at the Frick museum.

Thursday – I officially started helping out at Aphrochic! 😀

Friday – I went to LeFriday-3-march.gifnox Hill House to discuss my volunteer work for their annual Spring Gala, I also did a tour at MoMA about Mrs. Bloch-Bauer (she took her husband’s surname and added it to hers and he also did the same, extremely modern for 1900’s) and then I watched Chicken Run in the very nice MoMA cinema’s! I had a late lunch and went to the New York Historical Society, a VERY cool museum next to the Museum of Natural History. We also decided to watch the free film the had on show and we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Saturday – I had another 8am run with the PPTC (Prospect Park Track Club) and then I paid my $25 and became an official member! We had some lunch and went to the NYU BOBST library.

Sunday – We went to see Louie Giglio (first only on a screen fro New Jersey and then in the 5pm we saw him LIVE after rushing from Irving Plaza to the Times Square service, I have to yay for the Q-train, it’s really quick) at Hillsong and did washing and had some tea and cake with our friend Uma. Just something interesting I saw on Sunday as well, when you take the Q train from Brooklyn, be sure to sit on the left hand side (left if you look to the front a.k.a. the direction the train is going in) and look out for subway art!( Click here for some more background, the video isn’t my own but it shows it well enough until you can come here to 1.visit me and 2.experience it for yourself 🙂 ).

 

Meeting Marcel & cooking a masterpiece

I love these shoes! Warm and comfortable, perfect for exploring
The whole not-really-warm-enough outfit, our mirror and wall
a conversation and live music with violinists André and Yaga Siwy, friends of Marcel Broodthaers
Marcel Broodthaers – Cercle de Moules
Broodthaers experimented a lot with films
Broodthaers – La Salle Blanche (The white room, 1975). This re-creation of Broodthaers’ living room was presented at his last Paris retrospective in 1975, when it included a number of ‘Salles’, each revisiting facets of Broodthaers’ practice. Covering the walls were stencilled words – ‘galerie’, ‘musĂ©e’, ‘images’ – an art-world vocabulary. With its access blocked, visitors view the room from the outside, frontally, as if it were a painting of a perspectival interior. Devoid of actual objects, La Salle Blanche is a space of words, detached from their referents (http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/marcel-broodthaers/)

Yesterday I got to know about a new quirky artist (well, new to me), Marcel Broodthaers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I became an “Artist Member” of this wonderful institution on Tuesday (for $35 dollars instead of $85 for a “normal member”) because if you have your portfolio online in 2016 MoMA considers you to be an artist! As a member one of the perks is to see exhibitions before they are open to the rest of the public. Today there was a conversation and live music with violinists AndrĂ© and Yaga Siwy, friends of Marcel Broodthaers (click on link to read more about Broodthaers) who performed in his exhibitions in the 1960s.

 These people were his neighbours at a time when he was beginning to become a visual artists. They were music students and lived in the apartment close by. At the conversation they talked about how Marcel couldn’t understand why they constantly played the same music over and over again (scales) and why musicians had to work so hard. They said Broodthaers loved a good joke and often asked them to play inanimate objects, such as a “chair” or a “man who smokes”. What was especially interesting was that Broodthaers thought it was strange to think that a musician has to work so hard to play and master an instrument, to become a master of his trade while a visual artist didn’t necessarily have to do that – he didn’t. I am planning a few blog updates about art, about what is art and also an essay about Broodthaers: his life, work and philosophy.

(Interview with MoMA about this exhibition and Marcel Broodthaers)

I then started reading “What is Art?” written by Leo Tolstoy in the gift shop and I plan to read the whole book and make that part of my whole search (blog update alert! 🙂 ) for an answer to this unanswerable question. The rest of the freezing day (-3 degrees Celsius) wasn’t really remarkable until we got home and made some sublime food in our smashing new skillet.

We discovered “Kielbasa” and grilled it along with onions, red pepper, broccoli, potatoes and added a pasta sauce and some Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup! The whole meal was about $8 (and we would’ve been able to eat it for another meal but we didn’t leave any leftovers XD).

 

The almost masterpiece inside of the skillet
Cream of mushroom soup
The masterpiece
My LOVELY shwe shwe apron I brought from home (dankie Helena!) AND the best “pantoffels” (dankie MAMS!)
Happy spatula