My friend is visiting from San Francisco this week for work, so we went out to dinner tonight at an izakaya in the East Village. While the food was fine, it wasn’t anything to get excited about, and there was no “wow” factor in any single dish of the small plates/bowls we ordered. It was a bit of a downer (and when I shared this with Chris, he poked at me for glorifying the East Village dining scene… which is probably fair in this case). But at least it gave us some quiet time to catch up without many others around. Similar to how we would “open” restaurants in Uruguay and Argentina, we ended up being the first guests to arrive at 6pm here, and no one really started coming in until around 7:30 when we getting towards the end of our meal.

Afterwards, we chatted while walking all the way up to Koreatown, where we ended up at HHD (Heuk Hwa Dang), an international Korean franchise of bubble tea, croffles, specialty drinks, shaved ice, and coffee. Unusual for Koreatown, the space is very large, with plenty of tables, as well as large “step” seating, and the menu for desserts is huge. So we shared a massive mango strawberry “snowflake” (it’s essentially a shaved ice, except with shaved sweetened milk “ice”), generously topped with freshly cut fruit, jellies, and some soft-serve vanilla ice cream. As we spoke, we realized that our own voices had to keep getting louder and louder because we were surrounded by other people who were at least 10-15 years younger than us, talking and laughing loudly while enjoying their own shared snowflakes.

My friend chuckled and said, “It’s as though I can’t hear because it’s so loud in here… I keep straining to hear you! Are we getting older and just can’t tolerate this much noise, or are the acoustics here just that bad?”

It’s probably a little of A and B. We prefer quieter places to catch up when we see each other since we don’t see each other too often living on opposite ends of the country. Yes, the acoustics were pretty poor. But it was comical to think that while we would have been happy spending hours hanging out at a place this loud and young in our early 20s, now in our late 30s, there’s definitely a limit to how much time we want to be at these places. We don’t necessarily blend in because of our age and how we dress into crowds like these anymore. And as much as I love the East Village, I am definitely on the older side when it comes to people wandering around its streets now, even if I can still pass for much younger.