It was Mother’s Day, and Kam and I were both motherless in the big city. Mine has been gone since 2000, and his is on the exact opposite side of the country. So free of lunch and flower obligations to anyone but each other, we took to the streets. That day, we noticed for the first time just how many apartment buildings in the East Village have rooftop happenings: little windowed rooms, little gardens, little backyards eighty feet in the air. We also saw several new-to-us instances of our favourite oft-seen graffiti, “WOMP”:

Speaking of graffiti, we passed this installation by Paul Richard:

I get a real kick out of that.

Our first stop was Congee Village, which Kamran has been pestering me about for two years and which I’ve been actively avoiding. The menu is full of things like braised whole sea cucumber, steamed bird’s nest with rock candy, duck’s blood with ginger and scallion, and sun dried dace fish steamed with preserved pig’s belly. You can see why this might have me a little worried, right?

I pictured this creepy old dive serving pork stomach porridge out of its kitchen full of old men in soiled pants, but it was this bright, friendly restaurant with the most delicious little treasures. We had soup dumplings, which look like moneybags that you bite the top off and slurp the soup out of before eating the meat and wrapper. We had shark’s fin soup ($14 a bowl!), which is like eating not-quite-set-up Jell-o with bits of seafood in it (and is actually good, despite the weird texture). We had sea clams with XO sauce, which I have thankfully since forgotten. We had beef congee, which is thick rice porridge that was truthfully mostly flavorless until we dumped a bunch of red pepper flakes into it. And we had fried bread, which is on the dim sum part of the menu but comes with a side of thick icing to dunk it in.

Please ignore my hair here. I hadn’t showered and was full of sea clam.

We continued into Chinatown for Quickly bubble tea (do not get the lemon), gawking at durian hanging out innocently in markets, and buying $22-a-pound beef jerky in flavors like oyster sauce beef and wet spicy pork at New Beef King:

Chinatown was wildly crowded, so we decided to head for the water, which is always so relatively desolate as to seem like the suburbs. We found what we thought was an entirely unnecessary Western wear store but then passed a random horse down a street not three blocks later:

On our way to the Hudson River Park, three little kids suddenly came from behind us on scooters. They made it to the West Side Highway and then turned back around to join their parents. Then they came at us again, this time coming so close to Kam that he accidentally knocked one in the head with his pound of beef. (And I don’t mean that as a euphemism.) I turned around and shot the parents the meanest look to control their kids, but then I realized I was the childish one wearing a t-shirt with a dinosaur vomiting a rainbow on it.

We followed them to Pier 25, where we found a massive playground, a soccer field, and stunning views:

Also trash:

We ran into the Irish Hunger Memorial, an elevated little plot designed to look like the Irish countryside. I guess. I’ve never been to Ireland. And Kam’s never been hungry, as witnessed by his poor attempt at trying to fake it:

We somehow found ourselves walking down an alley and winding through some trees and coming upon these giant rock walls that didn’t seem to serve any purpose but were wildly impressive. And then just behind one of them, we found a secret playground! It was tiny and had exactly one slide and nothing else in it, but still:

Walking back uptown, we found a walkway from Stuyvesant High School across the West Side Highway, allowing for a vantage point we’ve never been able to appreciate before. Highway 9A is a little scary from the ground as a pedestrian in a city otherwise full of one- and two-lane streets, but it seemed like a lazy country road from up above that day:

Meandering from the West Village to the East, we found nonsensical signs and our very favourite NYC tag that would make for the greatest gay gang name of all time (MuffinMilk!):

And then appropriately, we ended the day by finding what may be my calling in life:

6.9 miles!