July 30, 2011

Look at all that sweatiness. Why am I so sweaty in my cut-off Asian Man Records shirt? My sister and I had just biked to Red Hook to go eat Filipino food. This was the first year I really had a bike in New York. My sister got a new bike with a smaller frame, and so she gave me her old one, and I was incredibly out of biking shape. I had never really biked in a city before - just once or twice in Columbus - and I never ridden a fixed gear. And it was also July in Brooklyn. So all that explains the sweat, but it doesn't explain why I endured all that just for Filipino food when just a couple of posts ago I wrote about how Filipino food wasn't a terribly big deal for me.

Well, this little stall in Red Hook had just been written up somewhere-or-other because it was only open in the summer, and generally only had hot food on mornings when a cruise ship was in. You see, when ships docked and the massive amounts of Filipino crew disembarked, this place was there to give them a small taste of home. During the non-sailor hours it was a convenience store selling imported goodies.

We showed up on the wrong day to have to compete for food with hungry Overseas Filipino Workers, but he still had some tasty stuff for us including some dish I'd never had, that I quite liked, that I can't remember the name of.

All in all it was not nearly the best Filipino food I've had in New York, but the bike ride was fun (including the 10 minutes we spent down there unable to find this place) and it was a really nice way to spend part of a sunny afternoon. It was also my first ride on a fixed gear bike, the ride that showed me that it wasn't really that hard to get to Red Hook from my place, and therefore the ride that really opened biking in Brooklyn up to me.