Sunday, November 25, 2007

New York missive no 1 - Mojo

Well I’m in what I think is going to be one of my regular coffee-drinking, NY Times-reading people-watching cafés…Mojo on Charles Street, just round the corner from the apartment. There’s a steady procession of Saturday-morning customers queuing for their caffeine fixes. Every second customer has a dog, confirming the fact it’s the must-have accessory here. Big men stroll the streets with tiny dogs on leads. Women use theirs as a conversation-starter, a bit like baby-talk. There are more street-signs for dog-owners than there are for cars.

Am just a bit bleary-eyed, after being awake for something like 26 hours yesterday (found myself going out to 4 in the morning after coming off the plane, in true just-arrived-in-NY style), then waking up at 7, partly due to the time difference and partly due to the long heater down one side of my room that doesn’t switch off. I’m either going to have to fix it, or live a carbon-wasteful life for a while with the heater on full and the window open, an improvised thermostat.

The bar we - as in my just-met roomate S and some of her friends - ended up in last night was Fat Cats, a sprawling basement at the end of Christopher Street with live jazz, ping-pong, pool, chess and scrabble. Though by the time we were there most of the scrabble games were abandoned to their unimpressively short words and people were focusing more on their beers. Emerged to find a street fight that was quickly dispelled by a big-bellied plain-clothed cop, his car lights flashing, his gun bulging from his back pocket and his chest plumped up to say “in case you hadn’t noticed, look who rules the roost round here.”

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