First of all, thanks for your comments regarding my banner photo. I'll fix it soon!
In the meantime, here's what I've been up to...
This weekend I planned a trip to NYC for under 24 hours. I would take the Chinatown bus up on Saturday, attend my friend's bachelorette slumber party, and then hop on a bus back to Baltimore the next morning. I wanted to spend more time in the city, but I convinced myself that I didn't have the time for that this weekend.
On Saturday, the ride up to NYC went so smoothly that I wondered why anyone ever takes Greyhound anymore. Even with my student discount, Greyhound costs almost twice as much. And no Greyhound station is ever a pleasant place. The bus dropped me off in midtown on the street, which is also much more pleasant than having to navigate through the fetid-smelling Port Authority.
On the subway ride up to my friend's apartment, I even made a friend - a fellow traveler trying to understand the B/C schedule up the West Side. The schedule is something like "i before e except after c", and eventually we understood it to mean that B trains run through that station except when you need them to and so then you have to take the D instead and transfer to the C. I have never had good luck just hopping on a northbound train going up the west side. I always end up overshooting my destination by about 40 streets. Actually, the woman I was talking with lives on the Upper West Side, and it made me feel a little bit better about my own confusion about the train schedule.
Anyway, I was amused to have someone to talk with since that never used to happen to me when I lived in the city. Of course, it was truly a temporary NYC subway friendship, so we talked only some of the time and otherwise held onto our subway poles and stared disinterestedly into space. Still, in that time I learned that her granddaughter is simultaneously learning Hebrew and English and we chatted a little about bilingual language acquisition.
The slumber party was fun, though we got into our PJ's a little too early for my taste. And one of the women there (one of my friend's fiancee's friends) had one of those self-important personalities, so until she left around midnight, she pretty much dominated the conversation. You know the type who thinks she's led a wilder crazier life than you could ever imagine and she throws in offhand comments about how she hopes she isn't offending you with any of her stories, but yet she really has no idea what kind of person you are because she hasn't bothered to find out.
Well, she left eventually and the rest of us stayed overnight. We talked. We watched Hitch. (During the movie I commented that I thought Amber Valletta looks like Dooce, and even though the internet agrees with me, no one I was talking to had heard of Dooce and explaining that I read her blog only garnered those looks that non-bloggers give you when you mention anything having to do with reading about other people's lives online.) And then we went to bed with nary a pillow fight.
The next day we went shopping in midtown for wedding shoes for the bride's sister while I dragged around my overnight bag, heavy with a camera, a battery charger, cell phone, phone charger, two books (one an unnecessarily huge treatise on photography), and all the other usual overnight necessities. By the time I headed for the street corner where the bus was supposed to come, my shoulder was numb and my feet were blistered.
And here is where I expected the story to end. I would take the bus back to Baltimore where J would be waiting to pick me up.
...
But I waited and waited and never saw the bus. I took pictures while I waited (this picture to the left is a pedestrian overpass above 32nd Street, and yes, I was standing in the middle of the road when I took it). I peered up and down the streets.
Twenty minutes after it was supposed to have come, another woman who was also waiting called the bus company and they told her that the bus had come and gone and now had 39 passengers on board. No matter how I replay the scene in my mind, I can find no place in which to imagine a bus pulling up to the intersection where we were waiting, picking up 39 people and their luggage and driving off. I also cannot imagine that perhaps I was waiting in the wrong place because the street sign was extremely clear: 32nd Street and Broadway. I had just been dropped off at that same intersection the day before.
The bus company told us our tickets would be good on the following bus at 6:30, two and a half hours later. The other woman accepted that and wandered off. I could find no other solution that didn't involve paying for another ticket home on another bus or train, so I decided to wait for the later bus. But just to be sure I was all set, I called the bus company back, at which point I found out that the 6:30 bus was now sold out and I would have to wait for the 11 pm bus!
Sitting in the heart of Korea Town with my heavy bag and blistered feet and no bus ride home, I gave up. I figured if the city wanted me this badly, it could have me. I called the bus company and had them change my reservation to Monday morning and I called Ianqui to find out what she was up to.
Ianqui invited me right over, let me put my bag down, gave me bandaids and a pair of flip flops, made dinner for me, entertained me for the night, and gave me a place to sleep. It couldn't have worked out any better.
She even engaged me in her latest project - designing our own t-shirts. We bought cheap (really cheap) t-shirts from H&M and on hers she decaled Charm City. I put the Katamari Damacy prince on mine and almost made a similar one for J before I decided it was too girly.
The next morning, at 7 am, I headed to the Chinatown stop, determined to actually find the bus. Fortunately, at this bus stop there was actually an office and they had my reservation on file. The bus showed up on time, they accepted my ticket, and I was finally on my way back to Baltimore.
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