I love showing off the pictures my Olympus320L takes, and Chinatown is the perfect place to take them. It's where the crowds are densest, where the colors are more vibrant, and where the ambiance is most exotic to this perpetual tourist. Where ever one goes the Asian population overwhelms the crowd of gawkers. There are some pagoda-style buildings to photograph, but what I notice most is the signs, the store signs, vibrant yellows and reds, the characters come in different styles, and I know not what they mean.

chinatown, nyc
This being New York City, all you have to do is cross the street to enter a different world. Right across Canal is Little Italy. Suddenly, rice noodles are replaced by pasta, but that's another story ... Little Italy is shrinking, getting smaller year by year as Chinatown spreads northward.

Here's Luna, the Italian Restaurant, just a block from my favorite food cart. The cart has been my source of most delicious roast pork, pork rolls and these pickled eggs for over a year now.

To me Chinatown is food. Food vendors on the street, restaurants up the stairs, down in the basements and up elevators. The side streets are filled with open stalls selling unfamiliar vegetables, roots, dried herbs, and fish: tons of fillets cooling on ice, or fish still alive flopping in buckets and spilling over onto the sidewalk, frightening passing tourists. Here's a sampling of images to round things out with a riot of colors.

fini!