Catch me over on the food posts making comments.

Here’s to their continued success

Alpine slide? Check.

Craft Beer? Check.

Waterfall-fed swimming holes? Check.

Deep Tissue Massage? Check.

Lobster Rolls? Crazygood Organic Pizza? Country Cooking? Maple Soft Serve? Checkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

4-month old Bernese mountain dog puppy playing witha garden hose?   Big fat check.  Kicking myself for not taking pictures.

Crashing two big fat Jewish Weddings? No check, but sure as hell thought about it for a minute til Nathan backed me down.

The bottle cap kind of sums it up:

killer way to end this ever-so-truncated summer.

Just settling in after 5 days in San Juan.  The trip was everything I could hope for.  I can’t think of any reason to write full paragraphs at the moment so here are my highlights:

• Dodging Hurricane Fay and Hiking to the top of El Yunque Peak while the storm bore down on the rest of the island.
• Pork Belly Chicharrones with Shallot Confit and Scotch Bonnet Fleur De Sel at Koco in the El San Juan Hotel [not to mention the outrageously good looking women at this place, Jesus].
• Having a massage therapist confirm that my left leg is longer than my right.  Take that grade school track team coach!
• Doing not one but two spit takes over the course of the weekend.  One involved some strange amalgamation of a 12 year tawny port, the happy birthday song, a flamenco dancer and an obese man doing a hoedown dance.
• Sea Kayaking in an 85+ degree Atlantic Ocean.
• Enjoying reading a book for the first time since law school started.
• Regaining my tolerance thanks to 2 hours of all you can drink wine tasting at BLT Steak, then rocket-fuel grappa at Il Mulino, followed by 5 straight hours of comp Jack & Gingers at the blackjack tables with a raucous group of new friends.  Beautiful disaster doesn’t begin to describe that night.  Oy va voy.
• Actually getting tan instead of burnt on an island vacation for once.

Anyway all in all it was kinda awesome.  The full batch of photos is up at my Flickr site.

I have a particularly strong set of memories from a pair of trips that my friends and I took to a hokey haunted house in the hamlet of Hamburg (shit, too much alliteration sorry) called the Ginger Dead castle.  A quick trip to the site of the castle bought back some serious nostalgia this weekend.  Hit the jump for the full story and a few pics.

The Ginger Dead castle was a haunted village that the town would set up each year at the site of the Old Ginger Bread Castle, a regional attraction opened in the 1920s by the creator of Milk Bone Dog Biscuits.  It started as a Fairytale Forest kind of place with Hansel and Gretel giving tours of the grounds, but eventually fell into disrepair.  In the 90s, they opened it in the fall as a haunted village.  It was your typical haunted house.  Lots of strobes, masks, dark corners with actors popping out, streams of blood etc etc etc.  For some reason I’ve always had an affinity for spaces that are being used in a grossly bastardized way from their initial purpose.  My favorite club in the city was housed in a former church, for example.  For that reason, a place that used to give little children such joy that now made money by scaring the shit out of them holds a special place in my heart.

I went to the haunted house twice.  The first time, I was 8 or 9.  I distinctly remember three things from the trip.  First, the token tough guy from my group of friends was the most scared and refused to walk anywhere but the back and held on to his mom’s hand the whole way through the haunted castle.  Second, my friend Patrick got so scared at one point that he stopped in his tracks,  crouched down in a ball and wrapped his entire body in his jacket like a freaked out anthropomorphic armadillo.  Third, after we got out we went to some pizza place and I burned my tongue on a shitty mozzarella stick.  The second time, I was 17.  My friend Monica was on crutches from an ice skating accident the week before and every time anything would jump out at her she’d start to drop her crutches and almost fall on her ass.  It was kind of epic.  We stopped at Wendy’s on the way home because there weren’t any down in our area at the time and had a food fight in the parking lot.  My car was covered in frosty and honey mustard dressing from one of the girls’ salads.  I was ok with it.

Anyway,  all these memories came rushing back to me on the way up to Monticello when i saw the sign for Gingerbread Castle Road.  I decided to deviate from the route for a minute to see what they were doing with the place these days.  I had heard about a restoration project a few years back and wanted to see if they had made any headway on it.  Turns out the project apparently didn’t get very far.  The place is totally dilapidated.  Windows busted, chipped paint, graffiti and overgrowth all over the place.  The main castle is still standing though.  It’s kind of bittersweet to see a place that occupies such a special place in the back of your head totally derelict, but it is what it is.  Part of me wants to draw some kind of metaphor here, but I did so much reflecting on other stuff this weekend that I’m all tapped out of any more wisdom.  I guess that’s what happens when you spend 4 hours in a car and far more time drinking with a philosophy major.  Here are a few more shots from the trip.  Sorry for the quality, we were in a bit of a rush.

boomp3.com

Housed in an old printing factory right on the edge of the hudson river, the place is nothing short of cavernous. It’s filled with phenomenal natural light and huge open spaces which allow the foundation to show off ginormous art installations, some the size of football fields. I don’t claim to know a ton about modern art, but I know what I saw today was both stimulating and challenging. I’ll leave it there.

Richard Serra’s pieces have made their way here, and they’re even more interesting to walk around in an enclosed space versus out in the open. Andy Warhol’s got a room, Fred Sandback’s strings are all over the place, the list goes on and on. What was most interesting to me, though, was the basement of the galleries. Right now, the museum is exhibiting Tacita Dean’s STILLNESS piece. You step downstairs out of the light filled galleries and into a single room the size of half the building. The room is pitch black and completely silent except for the sounds of 6 projectors, each showing a different life-sized shot of choreographer Merce Cunningham performing his interpretation of John Cage’s 4′33. 4′33 is a silent composition. As such, Merce Cunningham doesn’t move. The video itself is nothing special but the presentation is a mindfuck and a half. Highly recommended.

Anyway, I’ve dilly dallied enough. Gotta go back to studying now. Send good vibes my way over the next couple of days, cuz lord knows I’m gonna need them.