Blossoming Brooklyn trips - Easter

I know that it’s pretty overdue but… well during Easter we did go to Brooklyn and it was very nice and interesting so why not write about it now? Do not worry, it was not the only time. In fact it’s almost every week when we go there. To Brooklyn I mean. After all it’s such a fascinating, diverse and huge city, this Brooklyn.

First we went to Greenpoint, the old Polish neighborhood. It was Easter Saturday and after the fast of Friday I was hungry for some Polish Easter specials. We planned that we would shop the ingredients for some dishes I had plan to prepare for Sunday. And the climax would have been a lunch in a restaurant recommended by New York Times (Yeah, I’m sorry to say, but I needed to check NYT to know where to eat there). That was the plan, but as usual we went out later than we had planned. And then we spent almost one hour in the subway. When we finally got off at the Manhattan Av. we were starving and I realized that I didn’t note the exact address of the Lomzynianka restaurant.

Meanwhile, in the middle of Brooklyn, just few a blocks away from Williamsburg – hip nightlife area, we found ourselves on the street that looked like a main street in some country town in the central Poland. The same kind of stores, the same window decorations, the same bills. The stores were full of Polish products, starting with some specialty sausages, sweets or liquors… ending with “Polish”: coffee, tea, black pepper or Nivea cream. Beside groceries there were also Polish pharmacies, boutiques, bakeries, butchers, bookstores, beauty salons, and of course churches.

Because we spoke French between us neither the salesmen or the passers by recognized me as a Pole. Undiscovered I could hear few commentaries in my mother tongue… fortunately rather nice. It’s always fun to observe your own countryman when you have an opportunity to do it from some distance. It can be also annoying. But the strongest feeling then in Greenpoint was astonishment how it is possible in the middle of the New York City. Even the people where the same as in some small Polish town: they looked the same, they wore the same kind of anonymous clothes and haircuts, they used the very same jokes. And as at the Polish countryside only some of them spoke any English. As if it would be enough to turn around the corner and you could find open fields and farms. It was truly amazing to see that kind of a pill of your homeland. Somehow the essence, the very feeling of it, the very taste, and at the same time the very bitter caricature of it. Because this tiny, declining area appeared to me as a depressing place, a disappearing ghetto though the festive mood of Easter Saturday.

Finally we found all products we needed for cooking, and much much more. After all it’s not every day that we go shopping to Greenpoint. We passed nearly all neighborhood, by then really starving for some lunch and we couldn’t find Lomzynianka. When at last we were at the doors, discovering that we had passed already few times this small, not-looking-good but known-for-its-cuisine place, the waitress told us that they are closing. Well, Easter Saturday afternoon isn’t probably the best time to go out to the Polish traditional, family own restaurant. So we ate in the next one, and it wasn’t so good.

Sunday, after the Easter breakfast and some skyping, not discouraged by the previous day experience, we made our trip to Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Once more the reality of more than an hour spent underground in the middle of a sunny festive day was not exactly what we had imagined for the day. But once we got out all irritation at the traffic and the on going renovations was paid back by blossoming cherries and magnolias.

The Botanic Garden is a part of Prospect Park – peaceful English style park done by the same architects as Central Park. And it is a marvel. Not because of the beauty of the garden arrangement – which is rather conventional nineteenth century public park. The impressive thing is the splendid collection of plants. In the Easter time there were more different types of cherries and magnolias, all blooming one beside the other, more than I could ever guess that exist. Really fascinating to discover them all at once, in addition at their best. Maybe that’s why it took us a while to realize that there is no point in photographing every single type of bud, flower or twig. Even if all of them were screaming to us as to the bees: look at me!

But the Botanic Garden is in Brooklyn, in addition near by the Prospect Heights.Besides flowers and bees there were also old Russian ladies chatting in the shadows of the trees. However the most remarkable visitors were serious orthodox Jewish parents and grandparents surrounded by the running and playing groups of kids. All in black and white shaking their traditional curls.

When the Garden closed we sat by its entrance gate, in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Under the group of decorative cherry trees, in the light blushing shadow. Under the clouds of rosy petals shined through the golden light of the sunset. I thought how it is, that when you visit an ethnic neighborhood you can so easily enjoy it. You can taste a bit of its exotic flavor, get an image of its origins but you still can feel safe. You aren’t at “their” place. You are still home: in your big diverse but familiar city. I needed to go to “my” neighborhood to find out that it is not always so smooth, and that maybe those colorful Chinatown, little Brazil or small Odessa are not only entertaining decorations. That maybe they also are in a way a bit nostalgic or just sad. As maybe always the immigrants’ districts are.

At this time we were already riding toward “our” Harlem.

L.