Sarah Palin Haiku!

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"I know the knife is supposed to go next to the spoon, but where does the gun go?"

OK, I'm getting bad at keeping up on this. I've been too busy with my eyes glued, trainwreck-style, to the Player-Hatin' Palin craziness and the stock market clusterfuck. But here are some pictures.

Places I've Been: Long Time Gone Blowout Edition

I've been on a little hiatus from this blog, as you've probably noticed. It started when my former Spain roommate and traveling partner Erin came to visit me a few weeks back, and it just spiraled from there. (Haven't made it to the gym much either lately. Oink.) But in the meantime, I've been to lots of amazing restaurants and bars that you should consider popping into if you're ever in town:

RESTAURANTS
Serendipity 3, on 60th Street between 2nd and 3rd avenues (Upper East Side), is the restaurant from the movie "Serendipity." The place is filled with Tiffany lamps and there's an extremely random gift shop. Their specialty, pictured above, is frozen hot chocolate. Don't ask. Just drink.

UN Delegates' Dining Room, at the UN headquarters, 46th Street and 1st (Midtown East), is a good place to go if you're a tourist but don't want to feel touristy. Serves food from around the world, and the dessert table alone is worth the $20 buffet price tag. A good view of the river, plus you can eavesdrop on important people having important conversations. Reservations and dressing up are required. Get there at least half an hour early because you have to go through security.

Meson Sevilla, on 46th between 8th and 9th (Hell's Kitchen), is a tapas bar that has most of the good stuff I remember from Spain (mainly, tortilla and croquetas). But more importantly, there's cafe con leche — the champagne of coffees — and, naturally, sangria.

Veselka, at 9th Street and 2nd Avenue (East Village), is open all night. The service is terrible, but it's cheapish for manhattan. And there are pierogies. Like ten different kinds of them.

L'Express, at Park Avenue and 20th Street, is a French restaurant that's open all night. Menu has one page of food, three pages of beer and wine. I wasn't terribly impressed with the food (I had calamari), but hey, it's open all night. Also, probably the only French restaurant where you can hear "Ice, Ice Baby."

BARS
Ulysses, on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, is what CitySearch calls a gold-diggers' goldmine, and they are not making it up. If you want to meet yourself a hedge-fund sugar daddy, this is the place to be. And it's open until 4 a.m. every night, so take your time and be picky.

I'm not quite as impressed with Beauty Bar (14th St between 2nd and 3rd, East Village) now that I know it's a chain. But it's a cute little place, with old hair-dryer chairs and a dance floor. Go there to get a martini and a manicure for $10. Hospital-grade sterilization it's not, but I didn't get eaten alive by fungi and the polish lasted me a good week.

SUSHI
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a certain subset of New Yorkers who love their sushi. And since that same subset tends to settle in Hoboken, there are more sushi places here than you can possibly imagine. On Hudson Street is Sushi Lounge, as well as a place directly across the street. Pretty self-explanatory: eat sushi, listen to lounge music. But if you want better sushi, head a few blocks down to Sushi House, at 1st and Bloomfield (There's one around 14th and Washington too, but I've never been there).

Not Kidnapped

For those of you still reading this after I vanished for two weeks, you rock.

These ads popped up around hoboken a few weeks ago (around the time of the Georgia craziness):



Makes me sort of want to buy a bottle of svedka out of respect for their well-timed and just subtle enough hippieness.