Sunday, January 6, 2019
We woke up when we woke up, essentially sleeping in so far as we sleep in ever. This was nice because when you’re away from home you have nothing specific to get up for. You just kinda get up when you get up. Got out the door a bit after 10:00 and walked towards a place to grab some brunch. Shortly after walking out the door we realized how close we were to Barclays Center, where the Nets play. Pretty cool arena from the outside, I have to admit.
Brunch was decent, not amazing. We typically do our best to hit the best we can find with food but Brooklyn has had a lot of good-not-great place, of which this place was certainly guilty of. The name of it was Pure Bistro. You could do worse. Loss of points for mediocre coffee. Brooklyn is not the home to stellar coffee, as it turns out.
After we ate, we continued walking to Prospect Park and went to the Botanical Garden. Admission was free because our library has a member pass for it which we picked up on Friday. We didn’t have that much time to burn and being able to hit something for free was a no-loss proposition.
The best part of this was the Bonsai Garden, which was simply cool as hell. It was not especially extensive but each of these was awe-inspiring in some way and you can find yourself just staring at it and admiring the miniature trees that grow to resemble full sized trees that were shrunk by magic. Truly impressive.
Everything in the building next door to the Bonsai Garden was hanging. Not much blooming right now but this was 1 of the things with color. Overall, the whole Botanical Garden is not exactly at full blood in January which is another reason “free” is a great price to pay for admission.
We walked around the grounds to round out the time we had available before we had to head into Manhattan. One of the few things that are still colorful outside are the Winter Berries.
In all, we stayed there about 1.5 hours then made the trek to the subway and took the 2 to 42nd street, grabbed a coffee & some pastries, then made our way to the Barrymore Theatre to see The Band’s Visit.
I was really looking forward to seeing this show, so I was pretty excited to get this going. However, from almost the first minute, I was less than impressed. As the show went on, I found it hard to believe this has won 10 Tony Awards. The story itself was, well, honestly it was weak. The micro-stories were nothing special. The music was amazing but they used it very sparingly. In that respect I feel like the band was the Harlem Globetrotters but they kept passing the ball into the stands. The talent was there, but they didn’t utilize it nearly enough. Some of the singing was pretty off-key, and honestly none of the performers seemed to care very much. I think this must be a far cry from the original cast and this specific show was forgettable to say the least.
Absolutely not recommended.
You certainly win-some-lose-some, but Broadway is the big leagues and to see a miss like this is a major disappointment. I have been saying for a while that every Broadway show is a good show. Today proved me wrong. So it goes.
After the show we took the 2 back to Brooklyn, grabbed the car, and drove home. That’s a wrap on the weekend. I wrapped it up by tipping my hat to my man Jason and having some chocolate ice cream with a banana and melted PB & honey on top.
Make sure you don’t take the right lane:
Traveling Normandy 