My not so secret Secret Garden

You know how when you stumble across an object or a place or a youtube video so completely awesome some way or another that you almost get dizzy from the rush of adrenalin, become nauseously happy and giggle inside?

When that happens with me I proceed to try and store it in the particular file in my mind and then try to not share it with anyone because it is so awesome that I attempt to greedily horde it for as long as I can.

Of course that is not what eventuates usually, as I'm always bursting to tell anyone who would listen anything.

The disappointment comes here. In my gush of excitement at having told the captured victim of my extraordinary discovery, I usually expect equal awe with the person I'm sharing it with, proceeded with gratitude for my generosity to share. That doesn't happen either, because the response I usually get would be do you live under a rock?, and I, once again, would find that I'm not so alternative nor special in taste afterall, but that simply the society has made me feel like I am.

The following items are some which fall into that category for me:

• How I Met Your Mother
  
• Chicken and Rice
  
• Music by Metric
• The West Wing
• Popeye's Chicken
• Melissa's Mini Cupcakes (or are they muffins?)
  

Upon evaluation this list does not even come across as alternative. I concede that I have shot down many of these excited introductions myself; gleefully at that.

What I am trying to get to is that there is one particular thing that I feel will end up in that list above but certainly hope won't. That is, the random garden on Bowery 265.



















A few weeks ago I took one of my aimless ambles around Soho, because to me that area is chocfull of surprises and disappointments alike, and I love that about them. For example, what happened to What Goes around comes around? And who is The Rhodes, who were playing under the trees in Washington Square Park? I was due to meet Marie for a mini end-of-the-semester pubcrawl on One-on/&-one so I took a turn down Bleecker and lo and behold, discovered and adequately flavourful green curry, so I continued to walk down to find a nice little park to sit down and eat. Before I even got there though, I stumbled across this:















That is probably one of this most unpretentious welcome signs I have seen around the area. It is gorgeous! I sat down at exactly the same time where there was not a soul in the garden bar perhaps the critters and the birds- just me and a piece of manhattan that resembled nothing like it- a little chunk of an oasis.





















I have been brought up to know how to share though, so here it is. I had Elvis Costello's She in my head as I was sitting there, because it felt like exactly the place Julia and Hugh would have sat in the very, very end of Notting Hill.