Pictures... pond fountain

Brooklyn Vs. Queens or Queens Vs. Brooklyn

Let’s start with Kosher food:
Brooklyn has more selection. However, my friend and I went all down J and Coney Island looking for kosher places that would deliver when her husband would later get home from work at 9pm. I think Mendy’s was the only place that fit the bill. Most places weren’t even going to be open then. Queens has places open late, even late night delivery. In fact, I don’t even live in Kew Gardens Hills where the take out is. Yet, I can get a pizza delivered at midnight. Also, Subway: the one in Brooklyn doesn’t have fake (parve) cheese. The one in Queens does and they deliver, too.

Queens wins with food.

Now, the people…

I need some input from you, my readers… how ARE the people in Brooklyn? In Queens, it depends on the area. Now, if you are talking about Kew Gardens Hills, people are REALLY great. However, if you are talking about Forest Hills… well… I’ve been to Brooklyn for Shabbos the people seem nice enough to me. However, KGH has a hospitality committee for meals. That makes it easy to meet new people.

The people: undecided

Brooklyn College Vs. Queens College
I have run into a bunch of people in KGH who went to Brooklyn College because they had a better program for what they wanted to do. If you’re just going into speech therapy, sure Queens is right there. However, I specifically wanted marketing. There are some CUNYs that offer just marketing but, those schools didn’t work for me, for a different reason each. So, I chose Brooklyn College’s Business with a concentration in Marketing.

For me, Brooklyn won this one.

Now, I turn to you, my readers, what other aspects of the two boros should I compare and contrast?

A Cherry Gut Shabbos To You

I was inspired to blog about my "cherry" good Shabbos at Shabbos lunch. For both of my meals, the hosting family had cherries. I thought it was an interesting coincidence to which I thought I might add blogtivity.

I went to stay with one of the girls from my Yahoo discussion group who lives in Brooklyn. She arranged that we should go with her friends to some people for Friday night dinner. At the table were a grandmother, her husband, her math-hating 13-year old grandaughter, another woman and the four of us guests.

On Shabbos day, we headed out on a 40 minute trek across Brooklyn to our lunch hosts. We actually gave ourselves an hour so we had to kill some time before we arrived respectably early. This lunch hostess was also the step-daughter of another one of the members in the discussion group.

She invited us in and introduced her daughters. I took the names of her daughters and used puns to turn it into a sort of song. I like to play with words like that. She showed us to the living room and the comfy couches. Her son bounced in and curled up next to me as if he had known me for years. It was cute. One of the her daughters had a situation with one her dolls. Apparently, the foot broke on Shabbos and she was sad.

Soon after we were swooped over to the table to eat lunch. There was no gefilte fish :- ( Although, I kinda expected that since this woman's step mother teases me that I'm mamish a Jewish newbie for liking gefilte fish. There was a wide selection of salads for the "fish" course. It was particularily familiar to me as she has the same dishes as two other people I know. She also served the super secret salad dressing (ketchup/mayonaise-I heard it whispered once, ketchonaise?) Somewhere shortly after starting to eat, we discovered that she knows the wife of one of my rabbis. Well, the food was good... moving on...

We took Ocean Parkway back to my friend's place. We stopped a sat on benches intermittenly to watch the passers-by. I enjoyed the Jewish flavor of that Brooklyn stretch.

When we returned to her place for a stop, her roommate exclaimed as we came in the door, "that's so weird! I just had this weird feeling you were about to come back." It's interesting, as my friend tells me that she is normally out all day on Shabbos.

I tried to convince my friend of the need for a Shabbos nap. Oy, vey did I try to convince her! However, she dragged me back out. At least I had changed my top and put sneakers on. I needed sneakers to go "Africa far" as she put it. We were off to the bay to look at the water. My right sneaker was pinching my foot the whole way there. While there, I carefully slipped out of my sneaker leaving it on the ground, so as to not pick it up eruv-less. I discovered a giant sock wad. So, the walk back was much less painful.

When we returned, we chatted with her roommate for a bit. She was dying to hear my story. Then, I managed to get some of that coveted Shabbos nap I wanted so badly. I made havdalah for the three of us with my friend's brand new havdalah set which she purchased for the special occasion of her first Shabbos guest.