Our Tale of Two Cities by two manhattan kids: catherine & rachel

August 5, 2010

Tonight, Catherine and I met up for our usual: a workout followed by dinner. We met at 7 and headed east on 23rd street for a too-hot run along the East River. Circa the Williamsburg Bridge, sweaty and finding it hard to breathe in the 90+ degree weather, we decided to stop running and commenced the walking portion of our evening (or so we thought). We turned to cross the FDR and so began our adventures in an unknown part of our city, wrought with sketchy characters (at one point we felt so uncomfortable that we sprinted for two blocks) and unfamiliar street names…I’ve re-tooled Robert Frost’s famous poem “Walking Through Woods On a Snowy Evening” to describe our experience.

Walking Through Streets on a Wednesday Evening

Whose streets these are I do not know.
West Village? East Village? No.
The people are all sketchy here,
A veritable New York freakshow.

Catherine and I do think it queer
We never walk the streets with fear
But a run for it, we must make
With “ow ow” noises from the rear.

Passed a girl whose more than half baked
On Delancey Street, double takes:
White rasta-man is a creep
Quite an unpleasant scene he makes.

The streets are ugly, dark and deep.
And mice and rats play at our feet,
A man handcuffed against a jeep
And blocks to go before I sleep.

Though unsavory characters (and rodents) were defining features of the night, there were some redeeming elements of the evening. Chief among them were the fountain sodas we picked up at McDonald’s. They say on those 20/20-esque shows that soda fountains are breeding grounds for bacteria. You know what? I DON’T CARE. There is absolutely, unequivocally, nothing better than a fountain soda when you’re hot and thirsty. Catherine and I agree on this matter and I find that it is our like-mindedness on issues like these that makes our friendship strong and enduring. The first McDonald’s (yes, that’s right, the “first”) that we stopped at was located on Delancey Street and served us two deliciously fizzy Diet Cokes. When we finished sucking our bits of liquid heaven through our straws, we stopped in at the next Mickey D’s we encountered: 23rd Street. These DCs were even better than the Delancey batch and we determined that perhaps we should conduct a taste test of fountain sodas around the city. As a fountain soda expert, I can pretty confidently say that I think that the Golden Arches have the market cornered, but it would certainly be an interesting exercise to test the quality of the Diet Coke coming out of the fountain at McDonald’s joints around the country…perhaps a future blog is nascent?

-R