Hot Days in the City.

Yesterday was hot. It wasn't even all that hot, but it was humid. And for some reason, I was determined to leave the lovely cool bliss of our apartment to go read on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade at 3 in the afternoon.

This was the view from my bench in what little shade I could find. You can see, its not too shabby a place to sit back and relax in! Love that view of Lower Manhattan!

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade is this beautiful walk that runs perhaps a quarter of a mile or so along the waterfront. It has amazing views of the New York Harbor, the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. And the most unique thing about it is that it runs over a highway. So you have this piece of urban beauty lined with flower gardens and river views, and the honking of tractor trailers and cars running underneath. Kind of funny, but still an enjoyable place to go.

I'm enjoying getting back into leisure reading. After a year reading textbooks and assigned articles (and sometimes not even those!), its nice to enjoy books that I want to read when I want to read them. Unfortunately, with a Barnes and Noble across the street this can be a pricey undertaking.

I'm currently re-reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith. I read it as a child, so its vaguely familiar. But the account of life in New York not even a hundred years ago is so far from the New York I know and live in that I'm finding it really fascinating despite its young adult reading list status. When my parents visited in May, we visited the Tenement Musuem, and walked around recreations of apartment life at the turn of the century. I must say, re-reading this book with these images in mind is definitely helping the story come alive.

So that was my afternoon. I could really get used to this not working thing!

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