Adventures in Providence
It's been a very busy past few weeks. Work has been crazy, but we'll talk about that later.
Friday last week we took a ride to Providence. The idea just struck me one day while sitting at work. Ever since Patricia and Joe moved their food truck business from Torrington to Providence, I've idly thought about seeing them again. So, full of such an idle thought, I followed it with, "Why not this week?" Made the plans with Rosemary, and we were gone.
We had a double-whammy on the Providence trip, too. Turned out our friend Jonathan was in Providence on business! Had an idea that he was away from Philly for a few days, but no idea he was there. He dropped a line on Facebook soon after I posted about going there.
And while Rosemary never had been to Providence, it was my first trip there since I was on a recruitment trip to Brown University in 1997. Wow, that really was 15 years ago?
The ride out there was pretty uneventful. But the the stretch of country just as we hit crossed into Rhode Island looked likt he middle of Pennsylvania, full of gun and tattoo shops, ramshackle houses, old motels and diners, swap-meet places and stuff.
We met up with Jonathan in downtown Providence at the Biltmore Hotel. Little did I know this 1922 building is on the National Register of Historic Places. Upon walking in, we were dumbstruck by the lobby, done in jaw-dropping Beaux-arts style.
Look at that shit! Gold everywhere! Columns! A central elevator looking like a stairway to heaven. Sphinxes fashioned in the molding. And the lobby was decorated with antique used postcards from the '20s and '30s; it was awesome to read what people wrote to their friends and family from the road.
We got to check out Jonathan's suite, which featured this giant chair that was about 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide. Watching Rosemary sit in the chair reminded me of Lily Tomlin doing Edith Ann.
Of course, we took pictures.
Seeing Patricia and Joe was great, even better than eating their delicious goodies from their food truck. I got a cheeseburger with some of the freshest-tasting meat I've ever eaten. We got to catch up a ton and wish them well. Sadly, Torrington couldn't sustain them, but Providence is. Sad to see them leave CT, but happy to see them thrive nonetheless.
Jonathan and Rosemary wanted to see Brown, so we checked out the campus a bit. It's more urban and split up among a bunch of blocks than I was used to at Harvard. The old buildings are very colonial-looking. Rosemary got to pose with the Brown Bear statue, and she was amused by how the campus doesn't carry bottled water, but "hydration stations" instead -- beer tap-looking nozzles for filling up your Nalgene bottle.
We walked around Thayer Street, the main drag on College Hill. Picked up "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" by Mindy Kaling and my Harvard brother Baratunde Thurston's "How To Be Black" at Symposium Books. But overall wasn't all that impressed; a couple of frozen yogurt places, lots of pizza, some hookah lounges, a Tealuxe (of course). Harvard Square has so much more going on, I think. But it was still nice to walk around.
Ate some very tasty Korean barbecue from the Mama Kim's food truck and got a free T-shirt celebrating their anniversary. Funniest thing was how a Korean guy asked for a medium, was told they ran out, and then one of the women in the truck found one and ran him down to hand it to him, both of them speaking Korean. Always got one for a brother!
After Brown we headed over to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art. We got there with only an hour until closing, so we had to make a quick dash about the place. They have one big room with wall-to-wall European portraiture that is remarkable; one family portrait perfectly captured a boy's boredom standing there for the painting. The collection of Buddhist art in robes, sculpture and a gigantic wooden Buddha statue, simply amazing. And the lobby was full of the brilliant "Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear" series from Nancy Chunn, in which she has spent more than a decade already painting cartoonish scenarios for Chicken Little to fear in post-9/11 America.
After that, it was time to head home. I'd pinched a nerve in my neck that morning, so I was stiff and hurty all day. And standing for long periods of time wears on my shoulders, as if they are too heavy; maybe I need compensatory weight training?
But we didn't make it home quite yet. We made a detour for dinner with Gina at Loco Perro in East Hampton, CT. Ate a very tasty meal of shrimp-jalapeno poppers and baby back ribs. Rosemary drank a half-pitcher of sangria and got verrry silly. Took her home, we got in bed for a good night to the end of a great day.
More of those, please. Planning on going back soon to check out Federal Hill (aka Little Italy) and some more downtown Providence stuff. Take a ride out to Newport and see more of Rhode Island -- gotta keep exploring New England.