I finally took some photos of my neighborhood, but my wifi connection continues to be very spotty and I am afraid of attempting to upload them. Anyway. Last night I did a thing the hip young people do: I took the L train into Williamsburg and went to a bar. I had to wait and wait for the train (I was meeting someone at 10:30), and once it got to the station, it was already full of hipsters. So I had to stand along with a lot of others. I had never seen so many hipsters in one location: It was a sea of vintage clothing, plastic eyeglasses, fancy yet comfortable shoes, and black jackets. For the stretch underneath the East River towards Brooklyn, the ride got very wild, bumpy, and shaky. Someone standing behind me actually said "Ya-HOO!" at one point. And then it stopped at Bedford Ave., and almost everyone got off the train, the crowd forming a bottleneck at the stairways up to street level. It was like rush-hour for the hip. On the street people were hanging out everywhere, smoking outside of bars or just wandering around; the street was all well-lit like a fair was going on, but there wasn't. It was just the neighborhood-of-the-moment (or soon thereafter - if I know about it, how hip can it be?). When I found C, the friend I was meeting, I started cracking up.

We walked several blocks away, passing many warehouses and former industrial buildings with the occasional bar or old house interspersed at random. Our destination was Union Pool, which used to be a swimming pool supply company, and has no pool table of any kind inside. They have a very nice and spacious back porch - a perfect hangout situation because you can smoke with your drink. Lots and lots of cool/artsy/dorky people there. The crowd was kind of like the people I hang out with in N'ton, except instead of there being 5 or 6 of them, there were 200. Weird.

I stayed there and met a few new people, and around 1:30 C and J, one of the new people, and I decided to go to another place. So we checked out this one bar that looked, from the outside, like it was just someone's house, but the dancing and awesome music we though might be happening was not happening. So we went to another place, Capone's, because J had heard they had free pizza. And indeed, all you had to do was get a drink and they would hand you a small pizza. And the pizza was good, but the music was loud, and nobody was dancing. So then it was 2:30 and I decided I'd better get my ass back to Manhattan. Outside a yellow cab was just letting someone out, so with some encouragement from J and C I took it. 20 minutes later and $14 poorer, I was home. And that was my big night out as a city girl.