South Street Seaport

This Saturday we drove into NYC to hang out with Phil's family in Chinatown. Our first stop was lunch at Joe's Shanghai. It's a chain restuarant that is well known for their soup-filled dumplings. We ate with Phil's parents, his Aunt Mommy and cousin Kevin.
Phil's other cousin Lucia joined us as we were finishing lunch, and since we had already eaten most of the food we ordered another dish for her. She had picked up some deformed looking tomatoes on her way to lunch, which are apparently very expensive and very good. They're called "heirloom tomatoes" and they cost about $5 a pound! Those are some expensive tomatoes...After lunch we said goodbye to Kevin and the rest of us headed over to the South Street Seaport to walk around and check out the four waterfalls that were recently put up in the city. They're a piece of temporary public art funded by The Public Art Fund in NY. The waterfalls are supposed to be up until October of this year. Phil is very against the waterfalls and thinks that they're a waste of tax payer money...so he basically just wanted to go and complain about their uselessness in person. While I think it's a nice contrast to the city around it I tend to agree with Phil. Especially with the current economy it seems like there are other things that this money could have been used for. But, again, still nice to look at. Behind me is one of the waterfalls which flows right beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
When you pan out you can see another one in the distance, off to the left, behind the Brooklyn Bridge.

And when you look down towards the lower east side you can see the 3rd one.
In case anyone's interested here's the official website for the waterfalls: http://www.nycwaterfalls.org/

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While we were looking at the bridges across the river we saw some Water Taxis. As if there weren't enough of them on the road, they put them in the water too. Here's Lucia and Phil (and the famous heirloom tomato) resting their feet.
Here's Phi's mom lounging on one of the chairs overlooking the water. Phil was tempted to take one of the chairs for our new home, but they were bolted to the ground.
The deck with the view of the water is part of a mall area with little shops and a food court. We had some ice cream at Häagen-Dazs, which was super sweet, but very yummy. They have these new things called "Dazzlers", which is basically some combination of ice cream, caramel/syrup and bananas or oreo cookie crumbs just piled into a plastic cup. It was tasty, but like Lucia said, probably something that would taste better if you made it yourself.

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While we were walking around inside the mall area we came acorss something called the World Voices Project. There was a whole area with headphones hanging from a metal grid where you could listen to human rights readings in various different languages. It was kind of interesting, although it would have been nice if they told you what they were actually saying. There were definitely some languages represented there that I'd never heard of before.

Here's Phil trying to deciper some Mongolian...After we left the South Street Seaport Phil went to get a haircut - his first haircut at an actual barber in over 6 years! Between his college roommate and me, Phil pretty much has gotten free haircuts for a while, but he caved in and decided to spend the $10 to get his hair cut by someone who actually knows what they're doing. ^__^

Look how short his hair is now...