Home cooked (english version)

Having a simple day,normal, generous, sunny and joyfull, i believe it is a small gift from the universe after the emotional pandemonium of yesterday.

We woke up too early for our late-sleeper organisms… (Especially Gabbe who has finished her article around 4 am! i must admit i was already peacefully sleeping for 2 hours and a half, i’m a bit ashamed, but not that much)

We hoped in the bus and  reached Brooklyn Botanical garden. (Maybe you are asking yourselves, hum, this name reminds me something, i already heard it somewhere, stop searching! You discovered it here exactly a week ago.. yes we went back to a place we already went tobut for a good reason.)
We had to meet up with a friend of Gabrielle’s godmother and her husband. We waited at the entrance, patiently. We didn’t find them… We waited again.
We found it weird, we thought that they wouldn’t go in the garden without us. We went to the museum’s shop. Still nothing.

It is in those moments that we ask ourselves how people did before the invention of cellphone… (I have known those times before cellphone, but i was too young for it to affect my social life).

We called and finally we met up.
We were just each at our own entrance.

So it is Aïda et Michael that we found here.

Aïda et Mishka (i only heard this nickname allday so i can’t put another name) are an artists couple who live in Brooklyn for 25 years.
Aïda paint. She left her computer progamming work to dedicate herself to her art.
Mishka is a photographer. In an other life, he took fashion pictures. Now he walks around with his little digital camera and takes hundreds of pictures.

To meet those two, it was like find back a member of your family that you haven’t seen for a long time (or let’s say you best friend in kindergarten you haven’t seen since elementary school).

It’s like to put on your slippers and slip on a couch of generosity (oh my god, i’m gonna stop right there with my lousy metaphors…)

Right away they adopted us. They dragged us through the botanical garden. Mishka delivering us at every place a story, an anecdote, a date. As Aïda says « How he can remember all that, i don’t know, but he remembers everything! Better than a guide ».

(Warning: Pictures of flowers and other products of nature)

A cute little orchid

A camellia bonsaÏ in bloom

(it’s kinda crazy, we came a week ago and poof, a lot of plants changed!)

The waterfalls in the japanese garden

Shakespeare’s garden. One plant for One Shakespeare’s quote. One Shakespeare’s quote for one flower.

Like that, we’d say it is a tiny little flower, but the truth is there was a lot of them and they smelled like honey. Yes, honey. (It’s a pity that you can’t smell it through the screen because it smelled really good…)

 

I feel like i have to put again some pictures of this tiger orchid ( you know the one that doesn’t bloom often and hasn’t bloom for many years). And idecided to provide you with my explanation for her name. It is pretty simple, just look at the close-up. It seems like she has a mouth and teeth and that she wants to eat you alive, like a tiger in front of a gazelle!..

This one is my favourite of the day: it seems like she came out of Alice in wonderland’s disney movie. Anf if you get real close, i’m pretty sure you can hear her sing.

After that, we needed to recharge our batteries. And if you go to the Botanical Garden, just try the“Yellow magnolia canteen”, they have great salads, good, fresh and well seasoned (that is pretty rare here for now, especially at a decent price).

Then Mishka decided it wasn’t interesting (at least for today) and they took us to the Brooklyn bridge park. It’s a park that follows the East river and Brooklyn till the Manhattan bridge’s surrounding.

And they did good because there was an unobstructed view on Lower Manhattan’s buidlings

After getting on the Brooklyn bridge, we were able to admire it from under (yes there is a little flower shop under there)

We even had the right to our first picture (not selfie) together under the Brooklyn bridge (Real tourists! For real ! And i caught the gif’s virus…)

The four of us walked in Brooklyn Heights et Downtown Brooklyn (That’s okay i found my future neighborhood, we even found a building to renovate).

And that will be the small theater where i’ll play

Mishka gave us some dates, showed some details. I love to discover New York through this man’s eyes who seems to the city by heart, it makes it more endearing to me, it gives it back its history ( sometimes with my european eyes i think that nothing here is quite old, everything is new, and that Paris, for that, it is nice. It’s almost true except it’s also completely wrong). At the turn of a street, we found that:

In this precise street, at the end, you see the Manhattan bridge, and right through 2 pillars comes the Empire State Building. It was a magical appearance.

We took the subway again to Park slope (it’s where Aïda and Mishka’s flat is). Before going home, Aïda wanted to show us «Kensington Stables».

Right in Brooklyn, in the middle of the buildings, you can find a little stable where some horses live. You can ride them and go around Prospect Park.

Aïda and Mishka’s apartment is, if i remember correctly, a building from the twenties. It’s big enough and i liked the fact that the rooms seem to follow their own logic of organization. There are paintings and photographs on every wall ( Aïda would like to get rid of them, empty the space, and Mishka exclaims: we would have to throw your paintings then! She answers: No problem. And then he told us: get rid of the past…)

After two glasses of white wine (a wine from New Zeland mostly fruity and not bad even mostly good), we don’t walk quite straight but we gladly followed Mishka for a pre-meal walk in Prospect Park. We sense that he loves this park. And once again, he seems to know every details, to have his favorite spots (that he would like to show but we don’t have enough time).

This park is once again huge. It cuts us off completely from the city. It’s surprising, it’s peaceful.

The first autumn’s colors. (Mishka tried to scare me by telling me that if continues on being this warm, the leaves will just dry and fall without coloring. I hope he’s wrong, because if i don’t see Central Park red, orange, brown…)

The boathouse. A really beautiful reception hall.

Then we had to go home to Aïda for the meal. Our fist Home cooked meal in the United States (and since 12 days). It was indubitably good: Chicken (organic) with spices (curry, parpika and so on…), red rice ( a rice i didn’t know at all, it a grain of rice, just it is red and very tasty), a small salad with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and parsley. Followed by cheeses mad in US (real chesse with real milk inside, not like the « cheese » we found in the supermarket, one without milk…): a cheddar, sheep cheese and Halloumi (that Aïda fried a bit, which make it better!). To finish a strawberry ice cream with chocolate bits (made in Brooklyn).

We were spoiled! Our bellies were filled. We were really well received. Moreover we could finally talk english all day. We talked about GMO, the difficulty of being an artist, about Aïda’s life (we know now a lot about those two), about their pekinese dog they loved more than everything (She ate the same things they did, so they didn’t prepare 2 meals but 3. She was stubborn. And she chose Mishka that she adored. Except at first it was suppose to be Aïda’s dog…).They let us in their appartment in their intimacy without a problem. I love the uninhibited relation to art that Aïda has (people prefer abstract, fine with me, i do abstract too), and the more discret one Mishka has (who seems to have been around many people and make a great career but he doesn’t really talk about it). I love their simple relation to things. Like that, poof, they invited us again in their home (cause you’ll need another home cooked meal). I loved seeing them talking to one another as if suddenly we weren’t here anymore ( they « fight » about Aïda wanting to free some space, throw stuff up). We didn’t know who we would meet and it was a beautiful meeting. With those two characters, out of time, with their own look (they wore both tie and dye’s t-shirts made by Aïda), their personality, their entirety.

We took the subway full of enthusiasm. We waited, it never came. It was the day of the missed rendezvous (which all ended well). We had to take the subway in one way to be able to take it back in the other way, waiting it for a loooonnnnggggg time each time (On top of that there is no sign that indicates when the train is coming, i think if they did that in Paris, there would be murders).

And finally we reached home.

Thank you to Aïda et Mishka for this wonderful day (from the both of us), that i found even more New Yorky than ever.

Tchao my bun baos!

Roxane