Central Park Is No Place for a Speedo--But Really, Where Is?

So how is this for fun? Two people from my church wanted to take a trip to NYC. Turns out, they wanted to do it on my birthday. So that's what I did. On June 30, at 3:30 am, my travel buddies, Rich and Emma, and I boarded the Chinatown bus in DC and headed for the Big Apple.

We ended up getting there fairly early, and were off for a fun-filled adventure in the big city. Upon arriving, we wandered around Chinatown for a bit. It stinks. We then moved up a bit and walked, looking for a place to get a map until we happened upon a subway station. From there, we took the subway to Times Square, wandered around and I got the nastiest smoothie ever from a vendor at a farmer's market/street fair thing. I am sure you can sense my feelings of remorse when we passed a Jamba Juice only minutes later.

From Times Square (in case you didn't know, I was playing tour guide, since I was the only one in the group who had seen much of the city) I led them to Rockefeller Plaza and St. Patrick's Cathedral, up 5th Avenue to Central Park. We stopped a couple of places along the way and had a good time in FAO Schwartz. It turns out you can rent out the place for a party for your kids for a night, starting at $30,000. That was a few years ago. And you can buy one of these pianos for $250,000. "No thanks," says I.

Central Park is my absolute favorite place in the city. It is amazingly beautiful. That is until you decide to relax on the lawn and rest cause you're so tired from having maybe one hour of sleep, and you see a middle-aged man lying in the park on a towel wearing nothing but a speedo and sun tan lotion. Bear in mind this was my birthday--not a wish come true. After a bit of a rest, we meandered around the park and saw a cool little show by some performers who could do flips over people.

We left to find our hostel and we relaxed there for about an hour. We were beat. We took off again to do some more exploring, and ended up going to Grand Central Station. I wanted cheesecake for my birthday, so we went to Junior's, where I had been before and had their cheesecake. It is very good. However, we had the absolute worst service ever. The waitress took off for most of the time we were there. We waited and waited for her to come back, and finally we were sick of waiting, so I asked the girl who was bussing the table behind me if she could get it for us. Now the waitress was all smiles and lolly pops, but it was too little too late. She didn't even come by to ask if we wanted dessert. I was going to look at the check, but Emma said, "it's your birthday, I've got it." So I was not responsible for what happened to the tip. They (rightfully) left $1.35.

At this time I was busy responding to a text message (one of my 26 reasons why we love Darin Howard from Kade--btw I'm 26 now). I noticed they had left the tip and wasn't at all upset about it. But then the waitress comes to the table to see what we had left (while we were there--we were standing up, but still it's rude) she looks and I swear to you she says, "you're only leaving a dollar!?" I look up from my phone and said (loudly enough that the surrounding tables heard me, but not intentionally), "you were terrible," and I went back to the text message and walked away. Apparently a lot of people got a kick out of that. The table behind us was laughing. From there, we went to the Empire State Building and saw the amazing view from there.

Only one incident occurred at the hostel when two Asian girls first knocked for about five minutes on our door, and then opened the door and came into our room looking for a phone charger. Crazy, but we didn't have it and then they left.

The next day, we went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We came back to Manhattan and toured the financial district and saw Ground Zero. We ended up going to Little Italy for lunch, and wandered around SoHo for a bit. It's a cool little piece of the town, and we stumbled upon a special treat, Rice to Riches, where I got some cheesecake flavored rice pudding. From there, we took our pudding to go and walked to the bus in Chinatown.

Now, don't fret, that is not where this story ends. You see, we got on an earlier bus (4:00 pm) to get home earlier, but I walked into my apartment, and all manner of excitement that was going on there, at midnight. How did that happen? you may be asking yourselves. I'll tell you. Chinatown buses break down, at least ours did. We were stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike for about 2 1/2 to 3 hours waiting for a bus to pick us up and take us the rest of the way. So, eight fun-filled hours later, I was home-sweet...well at least home.

Now, for some opinuendo: In my humble opinion New York is great fun. A great place to visit, but so bloody expensive that I couldn't imagine living there. My opinion of the Chinatown bus is that it is worth the ten extra bucks to take the bus run by Hassidic Jews--far cleaner and we didn't break down when I took that one. Lastly, in my humble opinion, it is not wise to assume because it is midnight on Sunday/Monday and all of the lights are out, that your roommate is in his room, asleep.