New York, New Yoooooooooooork!

The song was in my head the entire weekend. It was my first time in NY and being there was weird because everywhere you looked you realized you had seen either the exact same thing or something very similar in a movie, on television, in a photograph. The friends we stayed with (Neil and Noopur) lived just a few blocks from the Seinfeld café (well, from the sign they used for the Seinfeld café at least).

Background:

I went with my sister and another friend. The three of us had been in Spain and Morocco together, so we were used to traveling together. Well, my sister and I are used to each other anyway and our friend was forced to get used to us. Apparently traveling with siblings can be entertaining. When my sister and I talk to each other in “you are a fucking dumbass” voices Leah calls us on it. She’s even named it “sister tone”. It makes us be nicer to each other.

Also we got to meet up with Nitin, a friend from Edmonton who lives a few hours from NYC and Prasanna, another friend from Saskatchewan who is doing his master’s at Colombia. Fun times!

Goal Setting:

My two goals for the trip were:
1. Eat a lot of really good food
2. See the Statue of Liberty

One out of two isn’t that bad. Obviously eating won. We were kind of near the area where you can see the Statue of Liberty I just forgot about it until it was too dark and got too cloudy to see it. Oh well.

Noopur and Neil were perfect hosts and led us on a gastronomical tour of New York. As fellow cheap asses, they had made it their priority to find the best “economically-priced” meals in New York. I think we paid less than $10 each for every meal except for one.

Top New York Meals:

1. Somewhere in Chinatown—we had these things called soup dumplings. I’ve never had one before, but they were damn good. We just ate A LOT of food at this place. And it was cheap. Food for 6 people with everyone absolutely full afterwards was $42. Amazing.
2. Korean BBQ- I had never had Korean BBQ. It’s like my dream. Meat…lots of meat. Delicious meat. Yum.
3. Sushi- I can’t remember where this was either. But if you ordered $14 of sushi or more it was half price. Honestly, we ate like a barrel of sushi. So good.

Entertainment:

--Jazz, Rent, and the Lion King--

On our first night in town we decided to just wander the streets of New York (Greenwich Village I think). We passed a cool jazz café and decided to go in since there was live jazz playing. I’m not really one for jazz normally, but this guy Eli Degibri was amazing (you can listen to streaming music off of his website).

As for Rent and the Lion King, they were both so well done. I had no idea what Rent was even about until I went and I was blown away by the musical talent and emotion in the musical. I guess I didn’t really fully appreciate what experiencing a musical live would be like. I won’t lie, Leah and I held hands and may have even shed a tear at the really emotional parts during Rent. Wonderful. The Lion King had really spectacular costumes and visual effects, and was definitely worth seeing as well.

The best thing about Rent was: raw emotion and musical talent
The best thing about the Lion King was: costumes and black men with nice muscles

Partying Parmar-style:

Noopur and Neil said that even though they had been in New York for a while they didn’t usually go out clubbing. Once that was said we realized we had no choice but to party Parmar. (Parmar is their last name). We decided to make “Parmar” the word of the night…could be used as an adjective, verb, whatever you wanted! We decided to “get our parmar on”, “parmar it up”, sing songs and switch lyrics so they included “parmar” and all sorts of other parmarifffic things. I should probably also mention that during this time we were sipping “road pops” that Neil and Noopur made us to drink on the way to the club since we got out of Rent late and wanted to be a little tipsy before getting to the bar.

Friday night was the night of randomness. We met the most random people. Leah went up and gave some person a high-5, we met a guy named Alejandro who was wearing an Ethiopia shirt (Leah is Ethiopian) and then started to talk to us about his time in India. Weird…

In the line to the club we started to talk to the guy in front of us (Michael). He was wearing a really hideous grad ring and I took a closer look and realized it said “University of Waterloo”. So I said, “Michael, are you CANADIAN?” He was, he bought us drinks and hung out with us that night, and I asked him if that was the first time his Waterloo ring had helped him make friends. He said yes.

Other things from the night:
-Meena and Leah mistaking the place where the dartboards were for a dance floor and being told “you better move or you’re going to be hit with a dart”
-Me chatting with the bathroom attendant in the unisex bathroom (a middle-aged Mexican man from Veracruz) and introducing him to Noopur and Neil. The line was long, so we started to chat and I got pretty much his whole life story!Meena going in later and wondering why this guy was talking to her in Spanish.
-Meena and Leah trying to get us into the club (not verbatim)-
Bouncer: It’s $5 for girls and $10 for guys. But it’s full so I can’t let you in.
[Meena and Leah try to smooth talk for a while]
Bouncer: Fine, $50 for all of you.
Meena: That doesn’t make sense! If there are 4 girls and 1 guy it should be $30.
[Leah elbows Meena]
Meena: Ohhh, I mean uhhh….
[a few seconds later Meena turns to Leah and whispers]
Meena: OH, he wanted us to BRIBE him!
Leah: Yeah dumbass. (she probably didn’t call Meena a dumbass but I would have)

Other:
-Went to Ground Zero
-Went to the MET (it's HUGE!)
-Hung out at South Street Seaport
-Shopping in Chinatown and SOHO

New York Didn’t Want Us to Leave:

For our flight home Sunday we were responsible people and tried to get to the airport 2 hours early for our flights. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. We were waiting for the airport bus which for some reason didn’t come so we hopped in a cab.

Dialogue from a ride with the world’s most aggressive and agitated cab driver:
[drives for like 2 minutes]
Us: There’s quite a bit of traffic
Taxi Driver: I think the road is closed. If the road is closed we can’t go.
Us: Let’s ask that traffic cop.
[Lean out the window and ask, traffic cop says it’s not closed. The traffic cop is wrong because about 2 blocks later they are diverting traffic]
TD: I TOLD YOU WE COULDN’T GO THIS WAY! I TOLD YOU THE ROAD WAS CLOSED. I CAN’T TAKE YOU TO THE AIRPORT!
Us: Isn’t there another way to go?
TD: DO YOU KNOW ANOTHER WAY TO GO? IF YOU KNOW A WAY TELL ME!
Us: Uhhh….we don’t live here…we have no idea how to go but there has to be more than one way to the airport.
TD: I TOLD YOU THERE ISN’T A WAY!
[we kind of look at each other like…what the fuck….]
Us: Well, we have to get to the airport. If you can’t take us we’ll just get another cab.
TD: FINE, BUT THERE’S NO WAY!
Us: Uhhh…ok.

So we had a cab driver with a fatalist attitude. We got out (all the while he was yelling at us and telling us there was NO WAY to get to the airport). We talk to a traffic cop and he says that if we walk two blocks down the street that is blocked off to traffic we can get another cab from there.

At this point we didn’t really know where we were until we saw this sign. There were a lot of people in the streets and it looked like there was a parade going on. We asked someone what was going on and it turns out it was African American Day. Yes, we were wheeling our carry-ons by the Apollo Theater in Harlem surrounded by people and pretty much about to hit the African American Day Parade.

Here’s Leah’s take:
"It was just another random adventure that added to the fun of the trip. My favorite memory was Meena running down 125th street in front of the Apollo loudly commenting that "there are a whole lotta black people coming at us" (which caused many a furrowed eyebrow amongst the black folk in earshot- which was many) and me thinking "we do not have time for Meena to get shot right now". Oh Loose Lips strikes again."

We got another cab and found our way to the airport. We missed our flights, they lost our bags, but we still managed to get home safely (without getting shot) and our bags came yesterday! Oh New York. Always an adventure.