In the NYC
Well, it took me twelve and half hours, but I finally arrived at the Hostel NY at 7:30 pm. Ok, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it 12.5 hours, because three of those hours were lost due to time zone issues. But still, my flight was supposed to leave at 7:00am sharp, and I locked my stuff in my room at 7:30pm local time. I say my flight was ’supposed’ to leave at seven because it actually left at more like 8:30, due to an unexpected loss of fuel-level-monitoring capability. This was discovered just moments before we hit the accelerator to lift our 30,000,000 tons of metal into the air. So we had to turn back around, wait to determine if there was really a problem, wait to determine the course of action, then finally taxi back to the terminal to have it looked at, then wait while they diagnosed the problem, then wait while they installed a brand new fuel-level-monitoring device, which looked oddly enough like a rather-too-young-looking chimpanzee. Standards certainly have fallen since my day.
As a nice piece of fortune I ran into one of my classmates (Lina) in LAX, and we not surprisingly were on the same plane. That meant that I didn’t have to make the trek out to Manhattan by myself, and instead meant that I got to shuttle a quivering undergrad girl around for seven hours. When she stepped off the bus in the city I swear I heard her say something akin to ‘mommy‘. Her hostel was in SoHo, and we were north of SoHo, and my hostel was north of that. So, instead of going to mine, we went to hers and I made sure she got in ok. Hers looked like a dump, and it was the one my professor reccommended to us. My hopes were not high. I took the 6 train to the 7 train to the 1 train uptown and exited at 103, where I was confronted with a rough-looking public housing project and 100 rough-looking housing project residents all staring at me like I was made of pastry-flavored cotton candy. ‘mommy‘. I figured as long as I looked like I knew where I was going, and could convey my now well practiced f-offishness, they would leave me alone. And also I saw a sign for my hostel across the street. To be honest, it’s just a big smashup of people, and there are so many that it’s easy to just get lost in the crowd. No big deal whatsoever. I went inside the place and found (as expected) that they had no room for me, even though I’d made a reservation last week. They got me a room for two nights, then another reservation for a different room for the final two nights. Oh well.
After slogging my stuff up five flights of stairs I got it locked up in my 10 person dorm room and quickly headed back to Grand Central station (1 train to 7 train again) where I met up with Lina to go to dinner. We found a nice on-the-street restaurant and ate, then walked around a bit, then went and got grocery-store food, then walked around a bit more, then went back to our respective hostels. Now I’m going to go hang out with my friend Gillie, who has also just arrived in the city. We shall see how that goes.
That’s what’s up.
-c
