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winter wonderland adventure
Dec. 11th, 2005 01:02 pmAs some of you know, there was a quasi-secret plan to take Kali to an event at the Bronx Zoo last night.
During winter, they have a Holiday Lights festival that is continuing from now into January. A couple of weeks ago I received an email via a girl I went to college with, whom I've largely lost touch with, announcing that she was performing her stilt walking stuff at the festival particularly during their Narnia celebration weekend.
Somehow, I got it into my head that Kali, being obsessed with Narnia, would be really into this and that I should take her. Being both romantic and peculiar, I also decided that the winter wonderland factor would be incomplete if I didn't get her a little white (fake) fur muff to keep her hands warm on our excursion.
Do you know how hard it is to find a muff? Eventually, after going to Target on an LJ-based suggestion (note to dude: those were legwarmers, not muffs), Kali saved me herself, as we randomly got discussing something and she brought up having had a muff for a wedding she was once in. And so, at the last minute, I was able to order the damn thing from a wedding supply shop out on Staten Island.
So yesterday, I picked her up at her office, presented the gift item (the box for which kept drawing "is that cake for me?" comments on my way up there, which led to an unnecessarily complex lesbian joke and was absolutely ridiculous by the time I got there), and then we took a cab over to the zoo. There we saw my friend (who just sent me a very startled email) dressed as the White Witch and walked through a big wardrobe to go to the Narnia stuff, which was very silly and delightful. We were also able to see tons of zoo things including tigers incredibly up close, the mouse, snake and monkey houses, camels, and a range of things in the petting zoo (including peacocks in the trees, llamas and goats). There was snow on everything from the storm the other day, and we spent a lot of time trying to find the vaguely secluded paths to just look up a hill or through the trees or over a waterfall or whatever and talk about our seriously geeky Descensus stuff like the composition of the menagerie on the Malfoy estate grounds. We had hot choclate, and a gingerbread man, and we rode the bug carosel. Additionally, while the piped in Christmas carols were often annoying, they were occassionally great, and twice we seemed to make a speaker go out by glaring at it, which was a nifty little bonus trick.
After dodging malicious or stupid children (okay, kids, banging on the glass as hard as you can to make the tiger growl when you can see the bloody remains of its lunch on a rock is not the best idea you've ever had), we hiked back to the train. There the 2 and the 5 run on the same track, and since the 2 came first we took that to the UWS, where in looking for a place to eat, we decided upon a Turkish restaurant. As we sat down at our table, we were very puzzled to learn our food was much more expensive than on the takeout menu we had perused, but all of this became clear when the belly dancer appeared. At first she was very, very covered, and took off more and more of her garb as the dances progressed. She was quite good, and rather hot in a tall curvacious fabulous way, and one of the dances was so oddly mournful and rivetting, and all of it led to Kali and I plotting an Obligatory Veela Moment for our story (actually, tons of story stuff got solved all night long, yay). And while we were surely speaking very quietly, a group of people speaking a language we couldn't identify at the next table were also clearly gossiping about us, long before our conversation went completely weird. Granted, our waitress was surly and when we got our leftovers wrapped they only included about half of them and there were a number of rude or uncouth patrons in the place, but ohhohhoho it was serendipitous fun and I suspect we will go again, now that we're fully aware of how to navigate the place.
It was an incredibly absurd, magical, twisted little evening. And! and we found more of the BPAL scents for our characters (again for the nerds keeping track: Lucius - whitechapel, Bella - Hell's Belles, Severus - les infortunes de la vertu, Rodolphus - king of clubs).
Rawr.
Now the next task is figuring out what we are going to do for New Year's.
During winter, they have a Holiday Lights festival that is continuing from now into January. A couple of weeks ago I received an email via a girl I went to college with, whom I've largely lost touch with, announcing that she was performing her stilt walking stuff at the festival particularly during their Narnia celebration weekend.
Somehow, I got it into my head that Kali, being obsessed with Narnia, would be really into this and that I should take her. Being both romantic and peculiar, I also decided that the winter wonderland factor would be incomplete if I didn't get her a little white (fake) fur muff to keep her hands warm on our excursion.
Do you know how hard it is to find a muff? Eventually, after going to Target on an LJ-based suggestion (note to dude: those were legwarmers, not muffs), Kali saved me herself, as we randomly got discussing something and she brought up having had a muff for a wedding she was once in. And so, at the last minute, I was able to order the damn thing from a wedding supply shop out on Staten Island.
So yesterday, I picked her up at her office, presented the gift item (the box for which kept drawing "is that cake for me?" comments on my way up there, which led to an unnecessarily complex lesbian joke and was absolutely ridiculous by the time I got there), and then we took a cab over to the zoo. There we saw my friend (who just sent me a very startled email) dressed as the White Witch and walked through a big wardrobe to go to the Narnia stuff, which was very silly and delightful. We were also able to see tons of zoo things including tigers incredibly up close, the mouse, snake and monkey houses, camels, and a range of things in the petting zoo (including peacocks in the trees, llamas and goats). There was snow on everything from the storm the other day, and we spent a lot of time trying to find the vaguely secluded paths to just look up a hill or through the trees or over a waterfall or whatever and talk about our seriously geeky Descensus stuff like the composition of the menagerie on the Malfoy estate grounds. We had hot choclate, and a gingerbread man, and we rode the bug carosel. Additionally, while the piped in Christmas carols were often annoying, they were occassionally great, and twice we seemed to make a speaker go out by glaring at it, which was a nifty little bonus trick.
After dodging malicious or stupid children (okay, kids, banging on the glass as hard as you can to make the tiger growl when you can see the bloody remains of its lunch on a rock is not the best idea you've ever had), we hiked back to the train. There the 2 and the 5 run on the same track, and since the 2 came first we took that to the UWS, where in looking for a place to eat, we decided upon a Turkish restaurant. As we sat down at our table, we were very puzzled to learn our food was much more expensive than on the takeout menu we had perused, but all of this became clear when the belly dancer appeared. At first she was very, very covered, and took off more and more of her garb as the dances progressed. She was quite good, and rather hot in a tall curvacious fabulous way, and one of the dances was so oddly mournful and rivetting, and all of it led to Kali and I plotting an Obligatory Veela Moment for our story (actually, tons of story stuff got solved all night long, yay). And while we were surely speaking very quietly, a group of people speaking a language we couldn't identify at the next table were also clearly gossiping about us, long before our conversation went completely weird. Granted, our waitress was surly and when we got our leftovers wrapped they only included about half of them and there were a number of rude or uncouth patrons in the place, but ohhohhoho it was serendipitous fun and I suspect we will go again, now that we're fully aware of how to navigate the place.
It was an incredibly absurd, magical, twisted little evening. And! and we found more of the BPAL scents for our characters (again for the nerds keeping track: Lucius - whitechapel, Bella - Hell's Belles, Severus - les infortunes de la vertu, Rodolphus - king of clubs).
Rawr.
Now the next task is figuring out what we are going to do for New Year's.
