ruhfus on rails

We spent Sunday in Brooklyn. We made our way to Smith St in Brooklyn. It’s a long commercial street that stretches down from downtown Brooklyn. You really would be forgiven for thinking that 50% of the Brooklyn population runs a bar, a café, a specialty fashion boutique specializing in rare imported denim, or a stationary and gift shop. 

We went to a great farmers market and had a really great lunch at a little bar.

Sunday Arvo @ Dumbo

Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is a post-industrial neighbourhood that has become popular artists and young families who like the factory conversions are cool. It’s also one of the major start-up / tech hubs in New York. It feels a bit like Alexandria or Waterloo in Sydney.

Guantanamo bay protest in Union Square

Italian Festival in Little Italy (Sausage)

We dumped our bags and went exploring the neighborhood. Greenpoint is a good mix of young families escaping the city, hipsters and Polish immigrants (new and old). We found a bar a few hundred meters away called Oak & Iron. It’s a pretty unassuming dive bar with a sweet juke-box. We got talking to a guy named Greg who works at this great digital agency called HUGE. They do lots of apps for big clients.

International travel is one of the few experiences that make me think it would actually be pretty convenient to live in a pan-global Orwellian future. Big Brother would already know everything about you; that should in theory do away with the need to go through the rigmarole of the x-rays, random bag checks and grouchy customs officials. And queuing.

Being on a plane is like being in a mad scientist’s human sized Petri dish. The mad scientist places several hundred healthy cell cultures with a not insignificant sprinkling of sick, diseased and crying infant microorganisms. Then he begins to play a sick game of trying to infect the healthy ones with the sick ones. This is done using climate modification (extreme air conditioning) and adding other bacteria (Air United plane food).