NY, NY.... eh

Well just got back from a nice long weekend vacation to NJ. Susan and I visited our friend Bob (former coworker) who was celebrating his 40th wedding anniversary and his kids (who are all around my age so strange calling them kids), asked if Susan and I could go as the surprise to their party.

Friday

We left Vegas on a red eye on Continental (we flew to Newark as it was easiest place to fly to logistically). Also, who knew that Newark,NJ is closer to the City as JFK? The flight was completely full! We left at 10pm and got in at 5:10 am (4 hour flight roughly with the time zone changes). Bob's daughter Jamie picked us up (and she's a port authority airport cop so she just parked her car out front and had her coworkers watch it! Talk about perks!) and took us to my friend Cami's place. From there we just crashed for a few hours (airplane sleep is not sleep).

Saturday

When party time started, a SUV picked us up and brought us to Bob's place. This was the big surprise part since Bob and Diane had no clue what was going to happen other than a car was going to pick them up at around noon. So we pull up to Bob's place, and he comes out, the driver rolls down the window, and before Bob even says Hi to the driver, he says, "My kids are driving me nuts!"



Then he looked over and Susan and I said, "Hi Bob." He was completely shocked to see us! Diane was shocked as well (but not in a rush to be shocked as when Bob told her to come to the car to see 2 people they hadn't seen in a while, she went back inside the house).

The party was great. I met Bob's friends and family (and not one of them was wearing a track suit!). The place is called Seasons, and it's a beautiful place. You can see it here. The food was great too!

Afterwards, we went back to Bob's for a while and then went back to Cami's. On the drive back, we got a quick tour of New Jersey. I saw the Bada Bing from the Sopranos, the Meadowlands, where the Jets and Giants play, and the Xanadu, from what I was told, just one big mess with a indoor ski hill in it.

Now off to Manhattan!

We took the Path train into the 33rd Street Station and when I got outside it was almost like walking into a movie set. We were 10 streets from Times Square but I could already see the lights. We walked past what I'm guessing has to be the world's biggest Macy's (it takes up a whole city block). I didn't know that Miracle on 34th Street was also named by since it took place in this Macy's.

Seeing Times Square was just like seeing it on TV. The lights, the glitz, the police barricades. I remember hearing on an episode of the Office that you can tell the tourists in New York because they're always looking up. Yup i'd believe it! It's funny how I didn't know Sex and the City 2 was coming out till I saw about 15 billboards plastered everywhere saying it.

We saw the Ed Sullivan Theater (home of the Late Show with David Letterman, more on that on Monday), Columbus Circle, the Met, the Lincoln Center, and the Library. From there it took about an hour to get home. From there, it was sleep time!


Sunday

The big day! We saw practically everywhere in lower Manhattan. We took the PATH train into the World Trade Center Station. It's still a big hole in the ground, but you can't really see it as it's all fenced off. We went to the display of the new WTC and it was like experiencing it all over again. The place showed the news reports from back then, pictures, time lines, and items recovered from the site. It was quite emotional; some people were crying. From there, we went to the World Financial Center, which gives a beautiful view of the Hudson, the Statue of Liberty, and New Jersey. We then made our way all the way to the other end of the island to the South Street Seaport. It's a semi hidden area of the City that a lot of tourists don't know about (it wasn't very busy there). We had a light snack of a piece of pizza (thin crust Unos pizza!) and then we took the water taxi around the City. We went past Battery Park (which got its name since military artillery was placed there waaaaaay back in the day), then on to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. From there we went to the east side of the City and toured the City's border with Brooklyn. It was a neat one hour tour (which was nice to get off our feet as our feet and legs were hurting from all the walking the night before!). Plus it was freaking windy as hell so it was nice to be inside the boat. After we got back to the South Street Seaport, we walked down to Wall Street and found the Golden Bull you see in all the ads and pictures. We then realized that it's less than a block from there to Battery Park (we were gonna skip that since we were trying not to walk due to the achy legs). So we went to Battery Park and saw this weird looking (yet slightly familiar) globe statue. When we got up to it, we found out it was artwork structure that was between Twin Towers. That's why it looked familiar.
After we left Battery Park, we took the #4 train to Chinatown. It wasn't as foreign looking as I thought it'd be (there were tons of white people there). Susan got a beef kabob from a street vendor (and started a trend as no one was buying from him but there was a line of 3 people after we left). The interesting thing was that when he rewarmed the kabob, he deep fried it instead of putting it on the grill. Grilled and then deep fried beef tastes interesting. From there, we went to BIG WONG! It's a fairly well known Chinatown restaurant known for their "Eat it and get out....NOW!" attitude. When Susan and I walked in and she pointed she wanted a seat, the lady NATURALLY assumes Susan speaks Cantonese and just busts it out talking to her. After we got sat, like 8 seconds later, she's ready to take our order. Susan asked why she couldn't find the roasted duck she wanted and the waitress told her that she had the wrong menu. They had the traditional menu and then the "Special Menu".
After looking at the people at the table next to us order, we realized the "Special Menu" is the "White Safe" food menu! The Panda Express type of food. That became a running joke for the rest of the trip. After we left BIG WONGs, we went explored more of the area and saw Wu Hop. We noticed it had 2 restaurants. One in the basement and one at ground level. This, we found out, is basically the Traditional downstairs, and the "Special Menu" upstairs. Strangely enough, the downstairs had a huge waiting line with white people! We left and walked over to Little Italy (next door to Chinatown). At this point, our legs were killing us so we just found a set of stairs to sit down on to rest for a while. OF COURSE, that very restaurant (which wasn't scheduled to open for 10 more minutes) happened to be the place that the only other people on the street wanted to go to. And it didn't look like it was open (all the lights were off and chairs were up and they were due to open in 10 minutes). So the people hung out there for a while hoping it'd open so we left since we couldn't stand their complaining that the place wasn't open. As we were walking along, we found a place that had a ton of people in it, which turned out to be rice pudding store. Out of curiosity, we were gonna try some, but it was $6 for a small one! I don't care how good they think it'll taste (rice pudding is gross), i'm not paying that much. After that, we took a subway to Grand Central Station so we could go to the Palm Steakhouse. Grand Central looks just like I remember it (the upstairs part). I remember we were standing in that area when we bought my first NY bagel and man that thing tasted good. Almost like a pretzel. We walked out to 45th and 2nd Ave, and then found out, the place was closed! WTF? Mothers Day and they're closed? They have a sister restaurant across the street, but I only wanted to go to this one since that's where the cartoon drawings are at. At that point we were a bit demoralized as we knew we'd have to do a lot of walking to get back to the subway station and find somewhere else to eat. But since we were just one street from the UN, we went over to take a picture (my famous, "The UN as seen on 24" photo that I took). Susan remembered there was a bus that would take us into chinatown from there so we took that down (mental note, they only take exact change in change, no dollar bills!) So we went back to Wu Hop and had their lobster which Susan was just raving for! Susan was salivating for that lobster and when we went by Wu Hop the first time, she was trying to convince me to eat the lobster rather than the steak. After that we went home and slept from this exhausting day.


Monday

Having learned our lessons from the two days before (mostly as couldn't move ha ha), we took this day reallllly easy. Originally planned was going to Central Park, 30 Rock, The Letterman Show (which I requested the tickets over a month in advance), and then the Mets game. After waking up and walking (very slowly) to the train station, we decided to skip Central Park and 30 Rock as we'd have to rush back to the Letterman show if we did that. So we went to midtown and had some street food (hot dogs and kabobs). The kabob was pretty good too. The hot dog was decent in that I had hoped it would have been grilled (since he grilled all the other meats), but it was just boiled so it didn't have as much flavor as I would have hoped. We had to wait in line for what seemed like forever for the Letterman show 3 different times. It got to the point I was about to kill a few of the show pages as they were really getting annoying and after a while just repeating themselves (this gets amplified when your feet are hurting so bad you can barely stand). FINALLY we get into the studio. The stage is surprisingly small. Camera tricks are incredible to make it looks so big. We had a comedian come out for a few minutes to warm up the crowd (and they were blasting the AC to get the temperature down to about 55 degrees since Dave likes it cold in there) and then Dave came out for a few seconds to say hi before the show started. An interesting tidbit is that behind the Manhattan mini city set they have is a bunch of trash cans, but i don't think you can see them on TV. Our guest line up (from the May 10th show) was:

Evangeline Lilly
Sam Rockwell
Whoever the American Idol castoff was that week
and the Million Dollar Quartet (a musical in Broadway)

They film the whole show in about an hour! Almost in real time like 24. When they cut to commercial on the show, they just finishing playing whatever song they're playing and then start right back up again (and Dave takes off his jacket at every commercial). Plus when they say they're gonna show a clip of something, they put this big ass tv right in front of Dave and his guest (so it's hard to see them due to that).

After the show, we took the train out to Queens to get to the Mets stadium (very convenient that they have a subway stop right in front of the stadium). Citi Field is beautiful! I've never seen a stadium (football, basketball, or hockey included) look this nice! Though it's a bit too open air for me (it was about 50 degrees at best with the wind chill that day so it was cold). We tried the Shake Shack (which was freaking expensive there! It cost us $30 for 2 burgers, 1 fry, 1 shake, and one drink!) And i'm guessing since it was stadium prepared it didn't taste as good as I've been told. Oh well, next time, we'll try it in Madison Square Park. Since it was freezing, we didn't stay for the whole game and got back to Cami's around 10 that night to get to bed and ready to travel the next day.

Our Tuesday was fairly uneventful. We left Cami's and took a train and a subway and then another train to JFK to fly back to home.

It was a fun trip to NY/NJ, but I don't think I could live there. Not having a car can be nice, and the public transportation system there is great! That being said, I don't think i'd have fun waiting for a subway or a train when i have tons of groceries to haul or when it's raining or cold. Maybe it's just the small town KC boy in me, but NY isn't for me. Next vacation is definitely going to be a cruise!