Lost weekend

As anyone who knows me off-blog is well aware, my favorite thing to do is walk around semi-aimlessly. Living in NYC, there's really never any need to visit another city for a change of scenery. Leaving behind charming/cutesy/obnoxiously boutiquey Court Street, where I had a spectacular almond brioche and cappuccino, I decided that rather than walking back to my apartment, where various productive things awaited me, I'd pick a random direction and go with it. The fact that it's in the 20s didn't faze me as much as maybe it should have, but oh well.

It didn't take long before I was in a totally unfamiliar city. I grew up in Manhattan, have a decent knowledge of many parts of Brooklyn, but had never taken exactly these turns before. First came some empty streets with government buildings, including the old Board of Education. At this point I saw signs for the Brooklyn Bridge, which I considered following with the end goal of finding this DUMBO everyone's been talking about, but realized I had no idea what to do re: trains back once I found it, nor did I have any sense whether walking back would take a half hour, an hour, or a week.

So I turned onto the Fulton Mall, which is a great deal like the main shopping street in Antwerp, or in another small-ish European city. Downtown Brooklyn, despite Brooklyn's hugeness, does have Manhattan for competition, after all. So despite a Macy's and a Lower Broadway-like array of sneaker stores, the shopping felt very practical, very "my son needs new shoes for school," rather than, "omigod I have to have the latest jeans." For what it's worth.

At this point I realized that I was vaguely near a street my friends had led me to for the first time the previous weekend, DeKalb Avenue. It had seemed like an interesting mix of over-the-top yuppification, near-Chicago-levels of dinginess, and pretty, pretty, park-facing brownstones, so with the help of a Fulton Mall directory sign, I made it to DeKalb. Initially I had no sense of which direction or how far to walk on it, but a combination of intuition and that tall building (clock tower?) over by Atlantic Avenue led me along.

DeKalb was less exciting than I remembered it, perhaps because it was way too cold for wandering around, so I decided to head home. But where would that be? My usually remarkable sense of direction, completely shot. So I walked a bit in one direction, then another, and then finally decided that the only way not to get completely lost was to head to the Atlantic Avenue shopping complex, home of Target. Once inside, I restrained myself and bought only paper towels, though a shiny red kettle and a set of martini glasses were awfully tempting.

The Brooklyn Target is a such a beacon of diversity, it's hard to know what to do other than give the place a standing ovation (in time for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, no less). Every race, every degree of each religion's religiousity, every age, every (well, not quite every) income level, the place makes shopping at one of those evil, gigantic stores seem like the ultimate PC experience, especially compared with the Court Street shops and cafes, where silly white yuppie-types, graduates of private colleges, no doubt, sip cappuccinos, eat Francophilic pastries, and read about the history of Zionism...