new york city - fall 2003 - day 2
Today was a beautiful day in the city. Painfully blue skies and cool fall breezes.
After showering, killing 3 minutes, then tapping her foot for maybe another 2, Libby got tired of waiting and just woke me up. When women are ready to go, they're ready to go, eh?
We hit the streets to try H&H bagels. They're apparently the best bagels on earth or something. They're also the closest bagels to our apartment. I had a raisin and Libby had sesame. They were indeed very good bagels, probably the best I've ever had, but they're just bagels. People freak out about good food all the time, but I guess I don't get all that charged up about a raisin bagel. The coffee we stopped and had in this cute little bistro was much more my speed.
While we sat in the window of said bistro, they were filming some TV show - Gagsters, I think - out front. These two dorky kids were sitting outside at one of the tables. The one kid's hat was on the ground. The kids would fake trying to reach the hat over the railing until some stranger passing by stopped to help pick it up. When the stranger picked it up - brace yourself for wackiness - there was a little stuffed mouse on a string that some producer lady would pull. Screaming and/or laughing would ensue. I'm not a big fan of that type of 'comedy', but it was still neat to see it happen live.
After our French roast, we decided to hit Chinatown for a book-guided walking tour. Took the subway down to Canal street and spent the next 5 or so hours walking through crazy busy streets lined with restaurants, green grocers, fish mongers, butchers, junk stores, fancy stores, and on this one street, like 15 barbers. There were also like 5000 signs, but they were all in Chinese, so I have no idea what they said. It was so cool. We lunched in this little noodle house, where they just sit you at big tables with people you don't know. I had a huge bowl of roast pork noodle soup. Libby had duck soup. Yum.
In Chinatown my camera batteries died. I bought some new Duracells at a little market, but when I put them in, my camera wouldn't turn on. Broken camera. Piece of crap. Blah blah. As a result, we didn't get too many pictures, but there was tons of neat stuff to take pictures of. Maybe we'll head back and take some another day.
Not wanting to go pictureless for the rest of the trip, I was bracing to spend the huge bucks for a new camera. We stopped in this little shop in Chinatown and they said to go to this other shop over on 34th and 9th named B&H camera. We made the trek. It was one of the craziest stores I've ever been in. Hard to describe. Hundreds of customers and hundreds of sales people all moving 100 miles per hour. All purchases get carried around in little green buckets that move on a ceiling mounted track so the room is full of this like 4 dimensional motion. Overwhelming. Anyway, the people there were super nice and helped fix my camera. After messing around with various possible solutions, it turned-out to be a battery problem. Apparently if you buy batteries in some little market in Chinatown, they're most likely not genuine name-brand batteries, they're cheap ones in Duracell clothing. Who knew people made knock-off AA batteries? Everyone but me, I guess. Even though I was pissed, I'm glad all I got taken for in Chinatown was some stupid fake batteries.
Full of joyous energy, we walked up to Times Square. That place was crazy. Soooo many people. TRL was raging, the theatres were getting cranked up, and everyone was getting off work all at the same time. Whoa.
On our way back to the subway, some NBC page girl was handing out stuff in front of - surprise - NBC studios. Turned out to be tickets to that Carson Daily show. What the hell, let's go watch. It was a big show, with that mini-Me guy, Colin Quinn, and Rod Stewart. It was also taped in the same studio where to they do SNL, so that was cool to see. I don't think we made it on camera, though. Last time I paint my chest for the peacock.
Day 2 highlights:
Using the bathroom at Starbucks and not buying anything. AKA - Sticking it to the man.
The older couple next to us in the noodle house was meeting their daughter to for lunch. They had brought all their mail along for her to read because they only spoke Chinese. She would take a piece and describe to them what it was. In most cases this meant trying to figure out if it was a credit card bill or a credit card offer.