19th July 2016 / Tuesday
Note: this is a recap post but we have a separate blog post with all the Brooklyn day pictures. Check that one out for all the visual exploits 🙂 

Our plans for today were to go and hit Brooklyn up – we weren’t 100% sure what we wanted to do but knew we wanted to see Williamsburg and find a little cafe that we’d read about that served flat whites and was run by Australians. Again, we really love finding little places that do a good egg breakfast like back home!

As we started out we thought we’d walk across the Williamsburg bridge, traipse around Brooklyn a bit and then come home across the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything in between was going to be a bit loose and spontaneous depending on how it went. 

To start the day we had a Pret A Manger falafel wrap to share and started our mission. We caught the subway down to the Lower East Side and then began our walk on the Williamsburg bridge. It was very graffitied and I was particularly nervy about how wobbly it felt due to the cars driving underneath but we trekked on! It was pretty warm and we were sweaty betties by the time we got across it and rocked into Williamsburg. 

Our first wander took us to the main lot of shops and it was all very low key and chill, everyone seemed a bit more alternative and younger and a bit hipster-ish but not in an annoying pretentious way. But what is the deal with white guys trying to rock big Afros? Anyway…

We grabbed a yummy protein shake from a little healthy food store which seemed pretty popular and then we started searching for the cafe we’d read about called Sweatshop. After wandering for a few minutes we stumbled across a cool graphic on a wall and realised it was the cafe we were after – so it gets points for design aesthetics. Also many points for making Tashy the best flat white she’d had in New York. Bonus!

After our breakfast, which was delicious, we kept wandering and thought perhaps we might see more of the area and there was a lot of art and graffiti on walls which were really interesting. However, we then realised we’d wandered into what felt less like a hipsters paradise and more like a gangsters paradise – the people started seeming a little more unhinged and the streets seemed a bit more derelict. 

We ducked into a health food store (which was really nice) to deliberate if we were being a bit precious or if we should trust our gut. We then thought it’s probably safer to trust our gut as we had no idea where we were going and could easily get lost and there were just a few too many people around who looked and were acting a little bit dodgy/insane. It was like Hollywood Boulevard all over again. 

We decided to go to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and catch a subway there to avoid walking streets we were unsure about – and to be fair, it could have just been a bad patch, but honestly it was not seeming like it was going to change! We ended up at Hoyt Street first (we had to catch two subways) and decided to look around and it was a whole other world. We were a very small minority of people who were not black and this was proper tv stereotype land – there was music playing from a loud boom box from a street stall and an older black lady was dancing in the street; there were sassy black people talking on phones like, ‘GURRRL, no he didn’t!’; there was just a general vibe of urbanness and we were mesmerised. 

We went shopping at a couple of stores and then caught the subway to the Broooklyn Museum which led us to the Botanic Gardens where it was still steamy hot but definitely felt a bit more gentrified after our excursion wandering in Williamsburg. We bought frozen yogurts from a truck stall and it was a mistake as it melted pretty much all over us – way too hot. 

Finally we made it into the gardens and we had a lucky coincidence that Tuesday’s are free entry days! That was a bonus and we loved the gardens. However, we were there later in the day so we only had about an hour or so till it closed so we knew we wouldn’t be able to drag it out and sit down and literally smell the roses. We hotfooted it around and it was gorgeous and would have been amazing if we’d got there earlier so we could have sat down to enjoy the scenery – but it was enjoyable nonetheless. 

After we had been denied entry into another part of the gardens due to them closing we decided to head to the Brooklyn Bridge. We caught yet another subway (our Metro unlimited card was totally worth it!) and got to the Brooklyn Bridge entrance. It was breathtaking. Totally different from the Williamsburg Bridge as it was pristine, wider and super touristy. Like SO touristy that it was hard to move in places so I was getting very grumpy. However, it was so gorgeous it distracted me from my anger and we took heaps of photos. 

We caught another subway home which was jammed with people from peak hour/work etc. Miserable. But we got home and had a mini rest before we had to leave to go to our dinner reservation at La Esquina. 

La Esquina is a cool hidden taqueria that you can only have reservations for (cuts off three weeks beforehand) and you access it through the diner on the outside and then go underground where you also need to duck through the kitchen before you get there.  Yet another time we almost got lost several times on the way!

The food was awesome and the cocktails were heavy and we got drunk.  Like drunk, drunk, drunk. We stumbled around Little Italy afterwards before finally catching another subway home to watch an ep of TV before passing out. 

Our poor feet and livers are taking a beating. 

Ju x