Nyuck Nyuck.
Unfortunately due to the combination of the excitement of flying, which is always great fun for me, and the baby going off behind us, I didn’t get much sleep on the way over. They had a nifty little channel on the DirectTV that showed where you were over the U.S., and I had fun tracking our route from time to time. At one point I’m pretty sure I was pretty close to directly over my parents who were on a trip of their own to Colorado and Wyoming. I of course hadn’t yet informed them of my own trip, so I found that hilarious. I’m not irresponsible though, I kept in touch with a few people after giving them my itinerary, in case things didn’t go according to plan.
Eventually, we did touch down at JFK on schedule, around 9am EST. This is where the real fun began for me. For once, I had no actual travel plans, no perfect routes, no strategy for getting to major attractions in a certain order or time period. Upon touching down, I was at an airport I’d never been to, in a city I’d only visited once, years previous. I actually didn’t even have my license at that point and thus didn’t do any driving, and have no idea whether we even stayed on Manhattan or somewhere else. So, my skills as a navigator would get a pretty good test throughout the weekend.
The first challenge was how to get from our gate to the subway, which apparently involved taking some sort of bus. After wandering around a couple terminals following the big Buses sign, we eventually found our way to a pile of people hanging out under like 10 signs all talking about different kinds and numbers of buses going various places. Of course none of them said “Subway” which would have been nice. After asking someone for help (yes even I do it occasionally) we figured out the yellow topped bus is what we needed, and were eventually merrily on our way. The subway system of payment was pretty easy to figure out, we decided buy 5 get 1 free should work out pretty well initially.
I really need to say something about how cool subways are. If Los Angeles had subways, the concept of traffic would be easily avoided. I don’t know why millions or billions haven’t been spent to make everyone’s life a little easier. They’re just the coolest things ever. You pay the $2 fare (which is the same whether you’re going 1 stop or from JFK all the way uptown), wait for the right train, up it zooms, open doors, walk in, close doors, and within seconds are zipping right along. For many people this might be an everyday fact of life, but for me this is something I’d love to be able to do as a commute. Not only is it easy and brainless, but you can be doing whatever you want since you’re not having to drive, like read. Even if you’re bored, there’s always relatively constant entertainment moving through the cars as you’ve probably heard. The system when you first look at it is pretty complicated, as there’s trains numbered 1-9 as well as like A-F, so figuring out what stops where and what destinations require transfers takes a bit of puzzling at first. The real catch is later in the evening after rush hour half the trains stop running, so the train you thought would take you isn't there, and the stop that you wanted to get off at gets skipped. Overall though, since Manhattan is set up like a grid, you just need to figure out whether you’re going uptown or downtown, and then make sure to go down the subway entrance on the right side of the street, when you’re facing your destination, so you’re sure to end up going the right direction and not end up on the wrong side of the tracks. Well, at least it sounds simple in my head. So yes anyway, subways are my preferred method of transportation.
Eventually we pop out at 110th street, right on the corner of Central Park. This was very neat, as I’d never been to Central Park. More on it later. The address of our hotel was on 107th, but the map I’d had didn’t have addresses, so I wasn’t really sure where along the almost a mile gap between the park and the Hudson River our hotel was. Figures it was like five blocks uphill. We actually blew by the place initially as I had read the address wrong, and had to backtrack, one of the minor navigation gaffes of the weekend. It was easy to miss though. Now, the way that we picked this place was surfing Expedia I think, sorting by price and reading the descriptions. Thus it was pretty dang cheap given it was on Manhattan. Now, the phrase you get what you pay for has never been more prevalent than in reference to our hotel. It was more like a foreign exchange student hostel. I heard no English spoken the entire time I was there. There were six floors, and we managed to get a room on the sixth. Heat rises, people. I’d say the room was about seven feet by maybe twelve feet, honest dimensions. There was a window, but 99% of the time no breeze was moving in or out. I’d estimate the temperature in the room during the day to be about 95 degrees, and during the night around 90. This was really the sole downer of the whole trip. The bed was slightly bigger than a twin, but certainly not a double. Some sort of 1.5 person style. Thus nights (or days depending on the sleeping schedule) consisted of being as naked as possible, lying inert on top of all the blankets and trying to ignore the heat and somehow fall asleep. This was not easy, and I failed most of the time. The bathroom by the way, was shared among half the floor. College dorm style I guess. It actually wasn’t all THAT dirty, and thus I can probably only put this at the second worst accommodations I’ve ever stayed at, behind the piece of trash in downtown Berkeley I stayed at once.
Oh I forgot to mention, we got to the hotel at 11, and found out checkin wasn’t until 3. Big bummer. We’d been travelling almost a full day, and just wanted to take a nap, but as it turned out had to stuff our bags in a $5 locker downstairs and go wander around.
We first hit up an Italian sidewalk café, where I had some lobster ravioli which was a new one for me. Very tasty stuff, although they lost our order for about 45 minutes until we said something, and then proceeded to be completely out of what she ordered so she had to order something else that took even longer. We were slightly irritated given we’d gone a long time without food, but that was a mere hiccup in the cheerfullness of the trip that was over as soon as our tummies were full. We then wandered up to Columbia University, which was apparently a place her brother was considering and thus many pictures were taken. Pretty neat looking place, lots of too rich for words people walking around snooty and proper.
After that we decided to go get a better look at Central Park. This is easily my favorite park I can remember. If I ever live in NYC, I’ll have to live within a mile of it, or it just wouldn’t be as amazing as it could be. The thing is gigantic. You could have 10k routes setup through it for each day of the week without repeating any paths. You can easily travel from flat pavement to a sloping trail to a granite rock face in the course of a few minutes. There are lakes and ponds, just a truckload of wildlife, and enough sunny grassy knolls to satisfy even the most avid reader. It really is a neat place to hang out. Unfortunately having packed light I had no running shoes so I couldn’t take advantage, although given the blistering heat that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway.
Eventually checkin time came and we wandered back to discover the room as described above. Tired, full, and hot, we decided to take a nap and attack midtown later that evening. Not much sleep was gotten, but I can’t really complain. After all I was in New York City, at least SOME sacrifices had to be made.
Obviously nothing interesting has gone on in my life since I returned, so I'll keep posting sections of this as I write them.
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
Just Another Typical Weekend, Except Not.
The young man takes a small sip, and slowly replaces his beverage onto the napkin. His eyes return from their glazed-over state to watch the bubbles take their turns popping near the surface of the dainty champagne styled glass. Losing interest, his gaze rises to the scene around him. Dozens of people walking by his table, all in a hurry, all on the way to somewhere, late for something. Cell phones, laptop cases, briefcases, all abound. A constant ambience of city noise infiltrates the man’s table at the small Italian sidewalk cafe. The people are all inches from him, yet miles away. He is oblivious to it all, in a different mental place from them altogether. He catches the eye of his companion across the table. She then follows his line of sight to the street sign located on the corner. On a green background, written in white, are the words “Broadway Avenue, New York City.” The reality of the situation hits them yet again, as it has all day, and their giddy laughter attracts bizarre stares from the passersby.
This is exactly the type of thing I wanted to do before I left. Total spontaneity, total out of control snap decision making, total randomness of outcomes.
So last Wednesday I was up at Chumash, and I eventually left up. Big. Second biggest trip ever at $632.
I only have three days of classes each week, so four day weekends allow a lot of options. So for once, I decided to do something with the time. For once, I decided to actually spend some money, do something incredible, and in the process, knock a few things off my life’s list of things I want to do.
There’s one person I tend to call when it comes to spontaneity. She is someone unlike anyone else I know, and even though we disagree on some major issues, for some reason we get along amazingly well. I mentioned the fact that I’d had a pretty ridiculous night at Chumash, during which just about everything worked out in my favor. Even as I tried to leave for example, my friend talked me into max betting one more machine, and a four of a kind landed me another few hundred dollars. Just a truly amazing pile of luck was stacked upon me that night. So we pondered, where could we go for the weekend, and what could we do. Eventually, she landed upon the idea of visiting a city she’d never been, but was at the top of her list to go to. Although I’d been to New York once before, it was about eight years ago or so, and piled into a cross country trip of a million other places, so I really don’t think I was old enough or aware enough to truly appreciate the city.
Obviously, I eventually agreed to the idea. The main factor was of course how much the trip would cost. My main contribution would be the plane tickets, and she would pay for lodging, while most other expenses got split. At first, it really didn’t seem like it was going to happen. Plane tickets were pretty ridiculously expensive, which makes sense, given we were trying to leave the next day, or even that night. Eventually though I stumbled upon a pretty great deal. For $230 each, we’d be able to red eye it Friday night and arrive 9am Saturday morning, and then fly back and arrive just before midnight on Monday night, in plenty of time for my Tuesday morning classes. Well, almost. The catch, was the flights weren’t out of Santa Barbara or LAX, but instead, Las Vegas. Vegas is about a six hour drive from SB, but for a reduction in price of around three or four hundred dollars a person, we decided it would be worth it.
A few clicks and a duffle bag worth of packing later, wham, I’m in the car and headed for the state line. Now, this really isn’t the type of thing most people do on a regular basis, if at all. All I can say is they’re missing out. I was actually originally supposed to be attending a wedding and then travelling across part of the Northwestern U.S. to Yellowstone and a few other places, but due to the inability to miss summer school classes, I was unable to go. Being a bit bitter, this was part of the reason I decided to take a vacation anyway. In five weeks I potentially won’t be taking any vacations for quite a while, so given I had a sudden influx of money out of nowhere, I figured splurging was merited.
I’m quite aware I’m spoiled rotten. Never was it more evident than on this trip. Just the fact that I was able to consider it as an option shows that I’m very lucky. This was one of the reasons I wanted to share the experience with someone else.
So, fast forward to later Friday night. We have a 1am flight to catch in Vegas. We leave about 4:30pm, figuring we’re golden, might even have time to sightsee a bit, or grab some prime rib (her favorite). Survey says, errrrrrrrrr. For those who have never driven from LA to Vegas on a Friday night, it’s a real party. A party with you and about a gazillion other people doing the same thing. We actually at least smartened up enough to cut across through Santa Clarita, Palmdale, and Lancaster, but although this avoided most of the garbage through LA, there was no avoiding the mighty 15. This was actually the worst I’d ever seen it, as a few accidents in the vicinity of Baker brought things literally to a standstill. Then there were the literally DOZENS of cars on the grade between Baker and Primm sitting on the side of the road having overheated. The reason being of course, it was HOT. And I do mean, HOT. No air conditioning was being used at least in our car to avoid such a fate, but with the outside air feeling like a heat wave, having the windows open in the 90 degree or so heat (at night even) didn’t help much. It was just a swelterfest. Me being the soon to be professional navigator, I was constantly doing calculations as to what our average speed needed to be for the remainder of the journey in order to get to the airport on time. For a while, I really thought we were screwed, and was doing the mental preparation of “well the money wasn’t even in your wallet until two days ago anyway, pretend you never won it” but was still pretty bummed. As it turned out though, the luck from the previous evenings kept on running. The traffic opened up pretty much just in time, and we busted through Primm and Jean at record speed after the grade ended. We decided to park at the New York New York Casino, not only because it was funny we were going to the real thing, but the fact that their parking structure is huge, free, and close to the airport. This was the first of many strategies used to save money during the trip.
We arrived at the ticket counter to find a decent sized line, and finally got to the front right at the 30 minute deadline for the flight’s boarding to begin and the computers to be closed out. As Murphy’s law dictates, when in a hurry the gate your plane is leaving from will be the furthest possible. Luckily due to the late departure time of 1am, there was basically no one in the airport and security took like five seconds. I ended up on the aisle, which has never been my favorite (I’m a window man), but at least I wasn’t in the middle (she was, but was in between two guys and apparently was far from minding). Ah, I forgot to mention we flew JetBlue, which was a first for me. Coolest thing by far is DirectTV on the plane at every seat, with like 30 channels of live TV to choose from. Between ESPN, the Game Show Network, and MacGyver reruns, I was kept pretty busy. Of course, I also tried to sleep, but we managed to get a loudly crying baby in the row behind us, and that made it pretty impossible. This was only the beginning of problems involved with trying to sleep during the trip however, will go into more detail later.
At this point in time, it had been about twelve hours since I’d decided to leave Santa Barbara for New York City, and I was somewhere over Kansas. The most common thought in my head then, and throughout the weekend, was “Wow, I’m really here, I’m really doing this, how much does this rock.” I tapped her on the shoulder as I’d done about five thousand times in the last hour and whispered “Dude, we’re going to NYC!” with a huge grin.
The party was just getting started.
The young man takes a small sip, and slowly replaces his beverage onto the napkin. His eyes return from their glazed-over state to watch the bubbles take their turns popping near the surface of the dainty champagne styled glass. Losing interest, his gaze rises to the scene around him. Dozens of people walking by his table, all in a hurry, all on the way to somewhere, late for something. Cell phones, laptop cases, briefcases, all abound. A constant ambience of city noise infiltrates the man’s table at the small Italian sidewalk cafe. The people are all inches from him, yet miles away. He is oblivious to it all, in a different mental place from them altogether. He catches the eye of his companion across the table. She then follows his line of sight to the street sign located on the corner. On a green background, written in white, are the words “Broadway Avenue, New York City.” The reality of the situation hits them yet again, as it has all day, and their giddy laughter attracts bizarre stares from the passersby.
This is exactly the type of thing I wanted to do before I left. Total spontaneity, total out of control snap decision making, total randomness of outcomes.
So last Wednesday I was up at Chumash, and I eventually left up. Big. Second biggest trip ever at $632.
I only have three days of classes each week, so four day weekends allow a lot of options. So for once, I decided to do something with the time. For once, I decided to actually spend some money, do something incredible, and in the process, knock a few things off my life’s list of things I want to do.
There’s one person I tend to call when it comes to spontaneity. She is someone unlike anyone else I know, and even though we disagree on some major issues, for some reason we get along amazingly well. I mentioned the fact that I’d had a pretty ridiculous night at Chumash, during which just about everything worked out in my favor. Even as I tried to leave for example, my friend talked me into max betting one more machine, and a four of a kind landed me another few hundred dollars. Just a truly amazing pile of luck was stacked upon me that night. So we pondered, where could we go for the weekend, and what could we do. Eventually, she landed upon the idea of visiting a city she’d never been, but was at the top of her list to go to. Although I’d been to New York once before, it was about eight years ago or so, and piled into a cross country trip of a million other places, so I really don’t think I was old enough or aware enough to truly appreciate the city.
Obviously, I eventually agreed to the idea. The main factor was of course how much the trip would cost. My main contribution would be the plane tickets, and she would pay for lodging, while most other expenses got split. At first, it really didn’t seem like it was going to happen. Plane tickets were pretty ridiculously expensive, which makes sense, given we were trying to leave the next day, or even that night. Eventually though I stumbled upon a pretty great deal. For $230 each, we’d be able to red eye it Friday night and arrive 9am Saturday morning, and then fly back and arrive just before midnight on Monday night, in plenty of time for my Tuesday morning classes. Well, almost. The catch, was the flights weren’t out of Santa Barbara or LAX, but instead, Las Vegas. Vegas is about a six hour drive from SB, but for a reduction in price of around three or four hundred dollars a person, we decided it would be worth it.
A few clicks and a duffle bag worth of packing later, wham, I’m in the car and headed for the state line. Now, this really isn’t the type of thing most people do on a regular basis, if at all. All I can say is they’re missing out. I was actually originally supposed to be attending a wedding and then travelling across part of the Northwestern U.S. to Yellowstone and a few other places, but due to the inability to miss summer school classes, I was unable to go. Being a bit bitter, this was part of the reason I decided to take a vacation anyway. In five weeks I potentially won’t be taking any vacations for quite a while, so given I had a sudden influx of money out of nowhere, I figured splurging was merited.
I’m quite aware I’m spoiled rotten. Never was it more evident than on this trip. Just the fact that I was able to consider it as an option shows that I’m very lucky. This was one of the reasons I wanted to share the experience with someone else.
So, fast forward to later Friday night. We have a 1am flight to catch in Vegas. We leave about 4:30pm, figuring we’re golden, might even have time to sightsee a bit, or grab some prime rib (her favorite). Survey says, errrrrrrrrr. For those who have never driven from LA to Vegas on a Friday night, it’s a real party. A party with you and about a gazillion other people doing the same thing. We actually at least smartened up enough to cut across through Santa Clarita, Palmdale, and Lancaster, but although this avoided most of the garbage through LA, there was no avoiding the mighty 15. This was actually the worst I’d ever seen it, as a few accidents in the vicinity of Baker brought things literally to a standstill. Then there were the literally DOZENS of cars on the grade between Baker and Primm sitting on the side of the road having overheated. The reason being of course, it was HOT. And I do mean, HOT. No air conditioning was being used at least in our car to avoid such a fate, but with the outside air feeling like a heat wave, having the windows open in the 90 degree or so heat (at night even) didn’t help much. It was just a swelterfest. Me being the soon to be professional navigator, I was constantly doing calculations as to what our average speed needed to be for the remainder of the journey in order to get to the airport on time. For a while, I really thought we were screwed, and was doing the mental preparation of “well the money wasn’t even in your wallet until two days ago anyway, pretend you never won it” but was still pretty bummed. As it turned out though, the luck from the previous evenings kept on running. The traffic opened up pretty much just in time, and we busted through Primm and Jean at record speed after the grade ended. We decided to park at the New York New York Casino, not only because it was funny we were going to the real thing, but the fact that their parking structure is huge, free, and close to the airport. This was the first of many strategies used to save money during the trip.
We arrived at the ticket counter to find a decent sized line, and finally got to the front right at the 30 minute deadline for the flight’s boarding to begin and the computers to be closed out. As Murphy’s law dictates, when in a hurry the gate your plane is leaving from will be the furthest possible. Luckily due to the late departure time of 1am, there was basically no one in the airport and security took like five seconds. I ended up on the aisle, which has never been my favorite (I’m a window man), but at least I wasn’t in the middle (she was, but was in between two guys and apparently was far from minding). Ah, I forgot to mention we flew JetBlue, which was a first for me. Coolest thing by far is DirectTV on the plane at every seat, with like 30 channels of live TV to choose from. Between ESPN, the Game Show Network, and MacGyver reruns, I was kept pretty busy. Of course, I also tried to sleep, but we managed to get a loudly crying baby in the row behind us, and that made it pretty impossible. This was only the beginning of problems involved with trying to sleep during the trip however, will go into more detail later.
At this point in time, it had been about twelve hours since I’d decided to leave Santa Barbara for New York City, and I was somewhere over Kansas. The most common thought in my head then, and throughout the weekend, was “Wow, I’m really here, I’m really doing this, how much does this rock.” I tapped her on the shoulder as I’d done about five thousand times in the last hour and whispered “Dude, we’re going to NYC!” with a huge grin.
The party was just getting started.
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Finally Got Around to It.
Okay so now I’m updating about events that happened like two weeks ago, but I have good reason.
Upcoming tomorrow and over the next few days will be a series of posts about the most recent weekend’s events, which should be quite interesting reading.
The week previous to my coming back to SB though, I did a bunch of things, some of which I probably have forgotten, which is sad. This is why I prefer blogging the day of, and now that I have a laptop in class and get bored because the professor doesn’t talk as fast as I type, that should be much easier to do.
So anyway, other than eating like a pig, which I did a lot of, I did manage to get out and do some fun stuff.
On I think that Wednesday night I was invited to go to the Galaxy game with my Uncle, cousin, and a few other people. What most people ask me when I say that is “what’s a Galaxy game?” For those who aren’t familiar with the world’s most popular sport, the L.A. Galaxy are a Major League Soccer team. Yes I’m aware that people in the U.S. are oblivious to the sport, but I’ve played it most of my life, and enjoy it immensely. I’d never been to a professional game though, and it ended up being an awesome experience. Somehow I went through childhood only attending like three professional sporting events, a couple baseball games and a football game. I live in the city of the world famous Staples Center but have never seen a basketball or hockey game, or even a concert or anything else there. Quite sad.
So anyway, soccer in person is a very cool thing. The one thing I can't emphasize enough is everyone is extremely fast. Like, there's two speeds, really fast, and ridiculously fast. If you're not at least the former then you will just get run over. The game was at the brand new Home Depot Center at Cal State Dominguez Hills, which is where they're going to have the Women's World Cup final upcoming. It is a pretty incredible venue, I was quite impressed. Being able to play inside it must be a pretty awesome experience.
The final score ended up being 1-1, which was sad because a shutout would have meant a free dozen Krispy Kremes for everyone in the audience. Booo. For the next few days I stuffed myself some more, then decided to go somewhere else I'd never been.
For some strange reason, I live in LA but don't do much of the stuff there is to do here. Therefore one of the things I'd missed out on over the years was Universal Studios, amazingly enough. I went that Saturday with my sister and her fiancee and a few of her friends, which was actually much more fun than I thought it would be.
The studio tour was pretty spiff, as you end up seeing a bunch of these movie sets that you've seen on the big screen. Something neato about actually being there. My favorite ride was the Jurassic Park one, some pretty neat effects on it as well as a pretty serious sized drop at the end. I wanted to ride it multiple times but it was sprinkling all day, and people were worried about getting wet. Buncha wimps. Shrek 4D was also pretty fun, that's one of those where the chairs shake and spit at you and do all sorts of strange things. Also props to the Terminator 3D show, a few of the effects there I can't even explain. Ooh, and Waterworld wasn't bad either, some big surprises. If you're going to skip something though, skip the Spiderman show. It's terrible. Really terrible. They advertised that a ton I remember, must have been a lot of disappointed folks.
Okay now that that's all out of the way, big post coming soon.
Okay so now I’m updating about events that happened like two weeks ago, but I have good reason.
Upcoming tomorrow and over the next few days will be a series of posts about the most recent weekend’s events, which should be quite interesting reading.
The week previous to my coming back to SB though, I did a bunch of things, some of which I probably have forgotten, which is sad. This is why I prefer blogging the day of, and now that I have a laptop in class and get bored because the professor doesn’t talk as fast as I type, that should be much easier to do.
So anyway, other than eating like a pig, which I did a lot of, I did manage to get out and do some fun stuff.
On I think that Wednesday night I was invited to go to the Galaxy game with my Uncle, cousin, and a few other people. What most people ask me when I say that is “what’s a Galaxy game?” For those who aren’t familiar with the world’s most popular sport, the L.A. Galaxy are a Major League Soccer team. Yes I’m aware that people in the U.S. are oblivious to the sport, but I’ve played it most of my life, and enjoy it immensely. I’d never been to a professional game though, and it ended up being an awesome experience. Somehow I went through childhood only attending like three professional sporting events, a couple baseball games and a football game. I live in the city of the world famous Staples Center but have never seen a basketball or hockey game, or even a concert or anything else there. Quite sad.
So anyway, soccer in person is a very cool thing. The one thing I can't emphasize enough is everyone is extremely fast. Like, there's two speeds, really fast, and ridiculously fast. If you're not at least the former then you will just get run over. The game was at the brand new Home Depot Center at Cal State Dominguez Hills, which is where they're going to have the Women's World Cup final upcoming. It is a pretty incredible venue, I was quite impressed. Being able to play inside it must be a pretty awesome experience.
The final score ended up being 1-1, which was sad because a shutout would have meant a free dozen Krispy Kremes for everyone in the audience. Booo. For the next few days I stuffed myself some more, then decided to go somewhere else I'd never been.
For some strange reason, I live in LA but don't do much of the stuff there is to do here. Therefore one of the things I'd missed out on over the years was Universal Studios, amazingly enough. I went that Saturday with my sister and her fiancee and a few of her friends, which was actually much more fun than I thought it would be.
The studio tour was pretty spiff, as you end up seeing a bunch of these movie sets that you've seen on the big screen. Something neato about actually being there. My favorite ride was the Jurassic Park one, some pretty neat effects on it as well as a pretty serious sized drop at the end. I wanted to ride it multiple times but it was sprinkling all day, and people were worried about getting wet. Buncha wimps. Shrek 4D was also pretty fun, that's one of those where the chairs shake and spit at you and do all sorts of strange things. Also props to the Terminator 3D show, a few of the effects there I can't even explain. Ooh, and Waterworld wasn't bad either, some big surprises. If you're going to skip something though, skip the Spiderman show. It's terrible. Really terrible. They advertised that a ton I remember, must have been a lot of disappointed folks.
Okay now that that's all out of the way, big post coming soon.
