Compare and contrast.

With my older brother in town, my parents like taking their children out on family outings. Yesterday we all bundled up and took the tram over to Roosevelt Island. We spent a little bit of time there - not the whole day, but a fun couple of hours exploring the south end of the island. It was alternately raining and snowing, but we liked that, and being on the East River, there were ample opportunities to joke about the visuals of the day looking straight out of a country from the former Soviet block. There were interesting birds to identify, a feral cat living in the ruins of the smallpox hospital, the FDR memorial itself, and no small number of other things that would've been fun to see if we hadn't left to eat lunch. There weren't a lot of other people around, and that suited my family just fine.

We ended up in a restaurant in Bloomingdale's that I described as a place designed to serve a lot of people very quickly with a high customer turnover. The food was all right, when it finally came, even though they got two of our five orders incorrect, and the lights and seating were never quite comfortable. It was loud, bright, and crowded, with almost a half-hour wait to get a five-person table - still better than the first place we'd wanted to go to, where the wait would've been two hours.

I took the restaurant in stride, since we were eating inside and sitting down. I would have cheerfully accepted just about anywhere for that.

Still, I found it a very nice contrast, since the two places were so close to each other, both in my encounters with them and physical space. One was very much the city people visit. And the other was very much the city people live in.

And I'll take the city people live in every time.