On Saturday PG and I braved the frustrating logic of the weather, that if it isn't cold it must at least be raining and windy, to explore the upper reaches of this island in search of housing options. Walking from the 90's to the 160's we zigzagged from Riverside to St. Nicholas. I was at once struck by the differences from the neighborhoods I more commonly frequent, and by the relative sameness exhibited by most of the neighborhoods we passed through. Certainly there is nothing pretentious about these places, and there is a welcome drop in the price of daily necessities. But while there are the countless bodegas and spanish restaurants just like my neighborhood has, it's more that that is all there is. PG observed at one point that we hadn't actually seen a supermarket for about a mile and a half. Niceties such as bookstores and cafes are most certainly to be forgotten. We also picked up on an evidently universal unwillingness on the part of dog owners to clean up after their pets. But in the end, the presence of such rents as are seen here, on the island of Manhattan, compensates for all these little complaints.

At the end of our walk we dined at a Spanish restaurant that, for its looks, had a surprisingly ambitious and expensive menu. We were just looking for lunch but it was hard to find a dish for less than $10. There were also mostly unique sets of about 15 specials for every day of the week. About 10 minutes after making up our minds, during which several other parties arrived and seemed to receive their food almost instantly, a waitress finally acknowledged us. It turned out the menu was perhaps overambitious; they did not have the ingredients for "shredded beef," so we both got the classic, Pollo Al Carbon, with rice and beans and an order of fried plantains. After consulting with a cook who told her in Spanish that it would be 15 minutes for the Pollo, she advised us it would be 10. All this apparently shoddy treatment, combined with a strange pricing structure that gave ranges for each dish and seemed to charge less for more food, made me feel as though we had arrived in some foreign country. Certainly we were outsiders, but it turned out my impressions were happily wrong, for the Pollo arrived in 10 minutes or less, everything was delicious, and somehow the entire meal cost $12.

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Near the end of the workday today, someone had a very convenient accident, by crashing their car right in front of the hospital's driveway. A fire department ambulance arrived and loaded in an injured passenger, then proceeded to sit there, directly in front of the driveway, for at least the 15 minutes until I went home.