Small Surprises All Around

I love walking  on and beneath the streets of New York and findinglittle surprises. Here are a few recent ones.

We took our granddaughters to Coney Island. They are 3 1/2 and 6. They enjoyed the small children rides, like the carousel and the tiny cars, and lunch at the famous Nathans.

 

At the arcade games, they were convinced that they could win a large plush unicorn. 

Someone (not me!) tried hard to explain that the games are designed to make it impossible to win the best prizes, but to no avail. They played, with some help, and were thrilled  with the tiny bears they did win, holding  them tight when they fell asleep in the car going home.

And we saw this. It’s not a good photo – a very overcast day – but it is a wedding party taking photos with Coney Island rides as background. That’s not something you see every day, though we see them often in the romantic parks in our neighborhood. Maybe this was the scene of their first date? Or where they met?

An amusing sign outside of a small restaurant on 34th Street, a major cross-town thoroughfare in Midtown Manhattan.  Who knew that egg rolls are traditional for a Sabbath meal?

In a subway station so under the street instead of on them, I recently  saw and heard a man playing  jazz saxophone. Not an unusual sight actually, but he wore the skull cap and fringed undershirt of an observant Orthodox Jew. That was the unusual part.  ( I couldn't get a photo.)

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My favorite of all is a grocery store at the other end of Brooklyn. I used to see it on the way to visit my mother in her last year, in a nursing home in a neighborhood called Manhattan Beach. (Yes, in Brooklyn. There must be an explanation for that, but I don’t know it). I would drive past a grocery store that had a sign on the awning “Asian, Mexican and Russian  groceries and halal meat.” (Halal meat satisfies religious requirements for devout Moslems)

And I would smile, every single time on that sad ride,  and think, “Only in New York.”