A social weekend

I've had a rather impressively active last few days. Doobs and I surprised even ourselves by rising and shining to meet the Vish for breakfast in the a.m. hours of Saturday. Mostly, we'd intended to assault him with a barrage of questions on his new belle, but turned out he was disappointingly unforthcoming with the level of detail we had been looking for. I don't understand why he couldn't just give in to the urge of a good ol' heart to heart gossip sesh, the lout. We tried every convoluted route possible to lure him into revealing a snippet or two, but either he could see through our wily ways, or he genuinely had no recollection of his romantic life. For the sake of our collective sanity, I prefer to conjecture the first.

After breakfast, the quantity of which had resulted in an abdominal turgidity that I hope to never experience again, the Vish and I set off on a bike ride around the city. We followed the normal route - cross town to central park, the loop around the park (inc. near-death on Heart Attack Hill), due west to catch the bike path on the western edge of Manhattan, and all the way round the island on the bike path till it brought us home on the East side again. An estimated 15 miles would be my guess, which might sound a sizeable amount to some, but if I'm going to seriously participate in the 60 mile bike ride in October, it's going to take more than that kind of putzing around.

Later that afternoon, once I had sufficiently recovered, Doobs and I decided to walk down to Soho to meet Queen Noor. We got typically side-tracked on the way, of course, which resulted in the serendipitous find of a small East Village Moroccan restaurant with a court yard to die for. It was more than an hour, and considerable ingestion/imbibation later, when we finally made it to Queen Noor's. There we each curled up on the couch in varied postures of feline coyness, and updated on the haps in the weeks gone by. Queen Noor had just come from Paris, I had just returned from Montana, so there was a fair share of catch-up-ing to be done. Somehow over the course of that afternoon, the location transmogrified into the back courtyard of a champagne bar. Not quite sure how that happened, but it's safe to assume I was much the happy partaker in the activity.

That evening, we all headed over to visit other friends in the city. They live in one of those new tall high-rises on Wall street, where we could just sit on the rooftop and bathe in a breathtakingly splendid view of the city. "Look at the Empire State Building right next to us!!" Doobs squealed, pointing over the edge. It's looking stunning!"
"It's definitely beautiful," I mused, "but, erm, that's not the Empire State Building, is it? I mean, we're on Wall Street, it wouldn't be next to us."
"Oh, right," said Doobs, turning beet red, "well it's beautiful anyway."

The following morning, I met Rohinton and Jeet for brunch in a little French cafe on Park Ave for which I've developed quite a fondness. As we ploughed through our scrambled eggs ("Thank gawd they gave American portions, not French ones," Rohinton commented), I questionned them on the details of their little vacation in Canada.
"We saw whales!" Rohinton exclaimed.
"And puffins!" Jeet added. "Lots of puffins!"

After brunch, I jumped onto my little blue bike (ye faithful steed) and pedalled furiously in a cloud of dust to the tennis courts where Delta and I were due to engage in a bit of ol' friendly tete a tete. It was a gloriously golden summer day, and all we had planned for the day was a spot of amateur tennis (we could barely get our serves in, but Delta still felt obliged nevertheless to jump over the net when the match was done), and a dinnertime rendez-vous with Shan-K. So after tennis we lounged about in the apartment for a while, and then headed down to the East village to meet Shan-K. There we sat with the sun to our backs, sipping wine and munching on village-esque organic-tofu-spinach-low-fat-no-cream-extra-salsa burritos.

And as the sun started to set, casting slanting shafts of vermillion across the sky, Delta and I, replete with food, wine, conversation and good cheer, held hands and set off on the meandering route home.