nonnaswanderings

You awaken to the cable car sounds below.

The mist lifts and the sun finds your face among the tall buildings.

The Ferry Building is alive outside with its weekend marketplace. Your senses sing praise to the offered bits of peaches and pluots, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, pickled vegetables, salmon, pastry, honey, lavender, sea salt and caramels.

Inside you wander the local bazaar for those Alfieri nuts, fungi, artisan cheese, books, flavored olive oil and rubs, chocolate and wine.

You inhale the salty sea air and blink at the light and color on the Bayside History Walk as it winds toward famed Pier 39.

Barking sea lions entertain an enthusiastic, cross-generational crowd lining the pier.

You gladly wait 45 minutes in line for the chowder at Hog Island Oyster Company.

The sidewalk art and performers make you smile. The nude bicyclists (particularly the one with the top hat and red ribbon adornment) make you look.

Giant mosaic and painted hearts dot the city, a reminder of those she steals away?

You find the Burritt Room & Tavern on the second floor of the Mystic Hotel in Union Square.  Smiling Hannah and a savvy bartender deliver the craft cocktail you’ve always wanted.  It’s called the “Whodunnit.”  Cherry Heering takes it over the top.

At Montesacro Pinseria Romano, the new enoteca that just opened in April, you become a fan of “pinsa.” You swoon at the lightness of the soy, rice and wheat crusted pie with tomatoes, pancetta and pecorino. The kale insalata with boquerones and more pecorino in the Tenderloin reminds you of that trip to Italy.

A day later in Chinatown, at a much older family-run business, the Oriental Pearl, Dim Sum is a delight, each morsel exquisite.

You are so lucky.