Dwight St & Van Dyke St (edited)

That is what the sign reads above the bus stop on the corner. The other sign says B77 - Red Hook. The salmon colored, cracking plaster of Rocky Sullivan's Tap Room extends the length of the block and wraps around the corner opposite us. Brand new Corona posters interrupt the blank spaces between the windows. The bottles, with sliced limes shoved into their tops, appear to be seeking refuge under the shady umbrella-like fronds of a palm tree on a hot, sandy beach somewhere. The few lonely people walking slowly in the distance, accosted by the uninterrupted drizzle, seek their own shelter under worn-out, black, nylon umbrellas. The gray of the city melts into the gray of the sky to create a single, uniformly depressed scenery. Only the blue corner of IKEA poking out behind some distant buildings and the pink plaster of Rocky Sullivan's add any real color to the picture. A bus goes by on the street in front of us. I recognize the ad on the side of the bus but writing is a language I am not familiar with. Hmm... Russian maybe? My mind quickly wanders the streets of Eastern Europe - distant places that exist more in my imagination and the imagination of Cold War era Hollywood productions than as anything really 'real'. Nevertheless, my Eastern Europe is full of places where the buses are covered in the pretend letters and words of the bus that just went by. A block further up, going in the opposite direction, another bus goes by - this one in Spanish. Across the water just to the west of us, a statue named Liberty translates both buses into a language that makes sense here - only in New York, only in this America.
Ariel finally comes down from his apartment and we get on our way.