This weekend, thanks to having out of town guests and thus without good excuses to be a bum, I did a bit of walking through some less-traveled (to me) parts of the city. With my friend Katie, visiting from Mass., I walked from my apartment in Long Island City over the Pulaski bridge into Brooklyn, through Greenpoint and down to Williamsburg, where we then got on the L and crossed into Manhattan. As we progressed through three boroughs, the farmer's markets got increasingly better, from the pretty sparse one in LIC, to the more vibrant one in Williamsburg's McCarren Park, to Manhattan's more well-known and well-represented market in Union Square. The jeans got skinnier, the Ray-Bans more abundant, and the language more colorful, shifting from English to Polish and back again. Points for artwork on the Pulaski bridge (below), and more points to Georgia V., whose gorgeous jewelry we snapped up at Artists and Fleas (N 6th between Bedford and Berry). We also discovered that she'll be opening her own store, Tria, in October (at Grand between Bedford and Berry) with a reception at the store on the 10th of the month. We didn't even make it much further into the market for the sake of our thinning wallets, but it's definitely worth a look.


Saturday evening we put on our Ohio State party pants and whooped it up with the best of Cleveland at Bar Coastal- thankfully, we also had Jess's birthday to celebrate, as well as hot lashings of beer and wings to ease the pain, as our dear Buckeyes left us with little to cheer for. Even a football illiterate like me knows a good ass-kicking when I see one. Celebrations continued at a karaoke bar, and finally ended with a post-party viewing of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as dead-on Sarah Palin and Hil Clinton.

Sunday saw culinary and cultural treats, as we went out for a delicious brunch at Balthazar, where we rubbed shoulders with the celebs (well...were at least in the same room as at least one celeb, Mr. Gordon Ramsay) and downed bloody marys with the Van Wagenens. After a lazy day of browsing street vendors and relaxing, I had a dinner date with my friend Elise, visiting from DC, at Dovetail on the Upper West Side. We enjoyed their "Sunday Suppa" menu, a very reasonable 3-course prix fixe. Elise and I had, respectively, cauliflower soup and crab ravioli to start, followed by lamb meatloaf and braised striped bass, then topped off with a selection of ice creams and a warm coffee cake. Treats!