Serendipitous

Context: This post is about the fifth and sixth days (and fourth and fifth days in the city) of my third New York City trip.

A few things come to mind about Little Brother's first experience in New York City.

Before we left for the Big Apple, he started his Instagram account, but he posted no photos. He explained that his first post would be a photo of him brushing his teeth on the streets of New York City. Okaaaay—?

Little Brother hated New York pigeons but rapidly became obsessed with the sparrows. At one point, a sparrow flitted past, and he yelled, "Oh my gosh. Marry me!" He added, "If I married a New York sparrow, I'd be happier than most people."

The final thing he really wanted from the trip was for me to take him for dim sum in Chinatown. On our last day (Monday), that's what we did. Bagels at Broadway Bagels, shopping for souvenirs (including at the Disney store and at this wild Japanese Line store), cookies at Levain Bakery, and dim sum at Shanghai Cafe. They had the best soup dumplings (dumplings filled with soup, not that you put in soup). Then we said goodbye to our sister, and then we left.

But that was Monday. Before that, Sunday.

Sunday morning we ate protein bars in Older Sister's apartment for our breakfast (we wanted to not eat out for at least one meal since Sabbath) and then attended sacrament meeting in the Manhattan temple chapel. Afterward, Central Park.

This entire trip, Little Brother and I had a devil of a time getting our phones to tell us anything other than the best subway trains to take. I guess the data in the city is over-saturated with users, because our phones just didn't seem able to pick up on basic navigation. However, they did pretty well in Central Park, which is ironic because it has traditionally been the most difficult part of the city to navigate.

Everything we wanted to see was happily located within a fairly small radius: the carousel, the Hans Christian Anderson statue, the Alice in Wonderland statue, the Balto statue. Along one of the walkways, we ran into delightful performers dressed as disembodied clothing/headless people. We stumbled across this beautiful fountain and square I don't recall seeing the last couple of times (Bethesda Fountain). It had a nice underground walkway with beautiful murals and acoustics emphasized by a musical group performing there. We also exited the park through the zoo, where we saw the famous animal clock.

Lunch was at one of the Central Park boathouses.

However, lunch was light and not that great, so after leaving the park, we partook of second lunch at Serendipity. (Serendipity 1 if you want to get snooty about it. I don't.)

If Tonn Ramen is designed to make patrons feel slightly uncomfortable, Serendipity is designed to make patrons feel...hmm. The bright pink paint, reflective surfaces, quirky signage, crowded tables, and rushed waiters kind of gave me an urge that I must have something better to do than being squashed with a bunch of strangers in a restaurant reflecting this level of inanity. Like, it was charming. But it also made me feel stupid and impatient.

We mostly went there for the frozen hot chocolate, which I'd been told was amazing. Sadly, it was merely adequate.

Our waiter, too, was rather touch-and-go. I could barely hear him over the din of the restaurant, and while he might have heard us, I don't think he was really listening. He forgot that I'd ordered a frozen hot chocolate, so I had to wait much longer than for mine than Little Brother did for his.

Little Brother overheard a patron at an adjacent table complaining that he'd received the wrong order. According to Little Brother, it went something like this:

PATRON: Oh, I didn't order this burger. I ordered the chicken basket with fries.

WAITER: What?

PATRON: I ordered the chicken basket with fries. I mean, this burger looks good. I'll eat it. But I'd also like a chicken basket to go if you could add that to my order.

WAITER: Okay. (picks up burger and walks away with it)

PATRON: What? What? Did you guys just see that?!

PATRON'S FRIENDS: Dude, calm down.

WAITER: I'm not going to calm down! I'm going to COMPLAIN. (heads off in search of manager)

Apparently whether you ever receive your food in this restaurant is a matter of serendipity. Ha. Ha ha. (Pretty sure this guy's friends were cracking similar jokes.)

Around this time, I headed off in search of the bathroom. Which was ridiculously hard to get to and required weaving between the many cramped tables.

Remember how we took tons of photos of ourselves on the Brooklyn Bridge two days before? Older Sister's phone has a setting for photo shoots, so the shots turned out looking weirdly professional. Little Brother had taken advantage of the situation by producing his toothbrush and snagging a photo of himself brushing his teeth on the bridge.

The photo looked ridiculous. In a good way. It looked like he was doing some kind of toothbrush modeling campaign. And now that Little Brother had the photo, he was determining the best way to present it on his Instagram account. Among other things, he toyed with it by assembling a Got Milk?-type image emblazoned with the word "Brush."

The Angry Chicken Basket Patron caught Little Brother's eye, so as I went to the restroom, he tried to figure out which phone in the room belonged to the Angry Chicken Basket Patron so that he could anonymously airdrop the "Brush." photo to him. Like you do.

When I returned from the restroom, the whole dining floor was abuzz with people who kept repeating the same thing over and over. I didn't think too much of it until I sat down at our table and we were approached by a random man.

RANDOM MAN: Is this you? (shows phone to Little Brother)

LITTLE BROTHER: Oh. sorry, that was an accident.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: What?

LITTLE BROTHER: Well...

Turned out that Little Brother had accidentally airdropped his photo not to the Angry Chicken Basket Patron but to every iPhone user in Serendipity. That repeated word I kept hearing over and over? Little Brother's name. Because his iPhone name is simply "Little Brother's iPhone." He'd been slightly hunched over the table, trying to keep his face turned away so that nobody would recognize him as the odd kid brushing his teeth on the Brooklyn Bridge in the weirdly professional photo they'd just had airdropped to them by a stranger.

As we hustled out of there, the room was still abuzz with his name, but we escaped without any more encounters.

The rest of the day passed rather uneventfully. We took a train downtown to stroll in Greenwich's Washington Square Park, where Little Brother once again tried to airdrop his photo to strangers because I don't know why, exactly. 'Twas amusing, though.

(Slight tangent: I'd mentioned to Little Brother that during this trip, I wasn't opposed to going to the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. He said he didn't really want to do that, so I never investigated the possibility further. I didn't realize until just last week that we'd been mere blocks from it at this point and possibly even walked past it! I'm very annoyed with myself for not catching that.)

We then attended the charity event Older Sister was working on all weekend. Following that, we called our dad to wish him a happy Father's Day while we waited to be seated at Jacob's Pickle.

I don't even like pickles, but I was willing to endure them in the name of trying new things. The pickles that came on my chicken biscuit sandwich weren't bad, but they still weren't my favorite. The honey-drizzled chicken was my favorite. So was the chocolate banana biscuit we got on the side. You'll see below that my meal also came with mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy. The mushroom gravy almost made me sick because it was waaaaay too rich.

It was super dark in there.

Then, like I said, the next day was the last day. Bagels. Shopping. (Little Brother loooooved the Line store, which apparently is the first of its kind in the U.S. I liked it okay, but I was mostly amused by animations with subtitles translated into poor English that played on the wall behind the checkout counter. One of them showed an ugly human living his best life and said, "James is a narcissist. He's in love with himself." I laughed way harder than I should have.)

Levain's. Chinatown.

I wish I was eating one of these chocolate chip walnut cookies right now!

Cute soup dumplings. They were filled with crab and pork.

Then, home. Nothing of note happened on the way home, so I won't tell you about it. Suffice it to say that we were pretty excited (about the souvenirs we got our family) and pretty exhausted (for obvious reasons) by the time we landed back in good old Utah.