DanielSonenberg.com

It's funny how it's taken leaving the city for me to understand how much I love it, and just what it is I love. After you've been gone awhile, you wander back in and let longing be your guide. Chinatown, for instance, was never a very central part of my existence in NYC, but every time we go back I feel this desperate desire to visit - walk amidst the dried shrimp and writhing fish, streets propulsive with kinetic sparkle. Sure I love to eat there too - despite all the new-fangled $4-a-scoop "gelato" places (yes, those are derisive quotes - there's never been convincing gelato outside of Italy, he said, snootily) the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory is the best scoop shop in this ice cream deprived town. This time we checked out Joe's Shanghai, and were generously treated by my aunt and uncle. I snuck a soup dumpling - just ate around the pork - and we also had soft shell crabs, spicy whole yellow fish, baby bokchoi, and pan fried noodles. The place has a rap for being overhyped and overpriced, but I thought it was just peachy - especially sitting at the big round tables with strangers, passing eats around on the lazy suzan. Afterwards picked up some sweet taro buns at one of the fab new bakeries that seem to have sprung up everywhere. There is no better pastry in the world than Chinese buns (and I don't even eat the pork ones - what's with this obsession of sticking pork into every type of consumable? I haven't come across any pork drinks...yet, but I bet they're out there). All this yumminess aside, it isn't so much the food I miss as the exilharation of being bounced off bodies, sailing down the street past the karaoke bars and bubble tea parlors, past the hucksters and the teapot shops and umbrella men, past the carts of various munchables and the pigs hanging in a window. It's the population density and the profusion of hard fast culture...more people on a single block than in all of Portland, Maine. And certainly more unidentifiable dried fish products.