This weekend, I decided to save some gas money and stay up in New York instead of going home. So on Saturday, I left my apartment to head into the city where my sister lives. I left at 10 a.m. and didn’t get to her apartment until noon. I had to transfer trains in Secaucus, New Jersey, and I now understand why everyone says New Jersey smells.
Anyway, after eating lunch at a nice Vietnamese restaurant on St. Marks, we went to the Museum of Modern Art. Instead of taking a bunch of pictures of paintings, I decided to take pictures of people looking at pictures, which I thought was much more interesting. Some people turned around while I was taking their picture, and it got really awkward. Mad awk, if you will. I would kind of point my camera to the side and look in the other direction, but I think they knew. They definitely knew.
Pictures of People Looking at Pictures
I never know what people are talking about or thinking about when they stand there and look at art. Call me shallow, but I kind of breezed through most of the galleries.
However, two galleries really caught my attention. Those were the architecture gallery and the contemporary furniture gallery. I guess I’m more interested in physical, 3-dimensional art. The architecture gallery was all about futuristic proposals to help New York City solve the issue of rising water levels, and the furniture gallery was just…furniture. But they were both really cool.
So after we left MoMA, my sister and I caught a train back to her apartment from Grand Central Station, which was gorgeous and reminded me of my favorite book as a child, The Cricket in Times Square. If you haven't read that book, I highly suggest that you do so.
At 8 o’clock, we went to the Peoples Improv Theater up on 29th Street to see an improv comedy show. It was absolutely hilarious, and I definitely hope to go back there soon. Their basic setup was that the group would sit in a circle and just talk about random stuff for about five minutes. Then for the next half hour they would improvise scenes that involved some detail of their conversation. Other members would jump in and add to the scenes or change to another scene. It was very creative, and the comedians were extremely talented.
Afterwards, I met up with my friend Jon, a film student at NYU, and we took the subway to Brooklyn, where his friend’s apartment was. I had never been to Brooklyn, so this experience was very cool. On the walk from the train station to Jon’s friend’s apartment, we were approached by a drunk guy who just really wanted to rap. So he walked with us for a block or two, spit some rhymes, and then went his way. Thus, my first impression of Brooklyn was being rapped at. Not rapped to or rapped for or rapped with. Rapped at. It was pretty sweet.
As if things couldn’t get any sweeter, once we got to the apartment, we ended up going up on the rooftop, where some Europeans had set up a little dance party. Some guy had set up a PA system and soundboard and everything and was bumping euro-trance. I was awestruck.
We were up there for probably an hour or so, just chatting and stuff. It was a beautiful night, and you could see the Manhattan skyline from where we were. I wish I had taken some pictures because that was definitely a new experience for me. The whole atmosphere was just so relaxing and cool. It felt like a scene from a movie or something. I want more rooftop parties!
At 1:30 a.m., Jon’s friends decided to go out to a bar in Manhattan. This is when I realized that I was not prepared for a night in the city because I was already dead tired. I gotta give it to them. New Yorkers are troopers when it comes to partying. So once we got to Manhattan, I pulled out the lame card and went back to my sister’s apartment to crash.
The next morning, I was woken by my mentor calling me on the phone. We had planned on meeting up in the city a few days before. So I got out of bed to find him on 3rd Avenue. We went to get lunch at the same Vietnamese place then headed over to 5th Avenue to watch some of the gay pride parade. It was a really fun time, and let’s just say there were some interesting characters.
After checking out the gay pride parade, my mentor and I went up north to visit the High Line park. The High Line is an entire park built on an old abandoned railroad that spans a few streets by Chelsea Pier. It was very hot, and there were some girls in bikinis just laying out on the park benches and reading. Only in New York City, I guess.
We then hopped back on the subway and went downtown to Pier 17, where some street performers were jamming on steel drums. We also had a great view of the Brooklyn Bridge.
By now I was completely exhausted, but my mentor wanted to check out Times Square, too. So we took the subway back uptown to Times Square, where there were literally a million people on the streets. I felt like I was going to die of suffocation.
As such, we didn’t spend much time at Times Square (ironic! haha not.) and headed to Penn Station to catch the train back to Jersey.
Just as a conclusion to an extremely long weekend, on the drive back to the apartment from the train station, I decided to go a little past our exit to get some Burger King at a rest stop. To my dismay, I realized that the next exit after the rest stop was another 15 miles. So I had to drive 15 miles down the highway just to come 15 miles back for freakin’ Burger King. Poor life decisions…
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