Flapjacks are too pancakes

So, the last day in NY was meant to be an ‘on your own’ day.  A chance to see what we wanted to each see individually, when we wanted.  And to be fair, by this time we all needed a little time apart from each other.  There’s only so much time you can spend cooped up together before you go a little crazy.

Anyway, that was the plan.  It soon ganged agley.  We went out for breakfast at a ‘diner’ called the Silver Spur.  This time I decided to try flapjacks, just to prove to Cathy (my Irish ex-flattie) that a flapjack in America is akin to a pancake, and not some strange concoction of oat, raisins, and burning.

The worst tasting whipped cream EVER!

And it was.  Akin to a pancake.  In fact, that’s exactly what it was.  Except, mine had chocolate chips in it.  Oh, rapture!  In an all to common occurrence at meal time in the US, my eyes were once again far too big for my stomach, and I thought I’d upsize to the 4” stack.  No tiny 2 inches for me.  I’d barely even feel that!

(Sorry, I’ve been watching Drawn Together the last couple of nights, so am in a puerile humour sort of a mood…)

Anyhooooo, the flapjacks arrived in all their chocolate chip embedded glory.  With strawberries, and the worst tasting whipped cream EVER!  Until my sister suggested that it was actually whipped butter.  Ah, that would explain the saltiness, if not the complete lack of colour.  Still, anything tastes good when it’s dosed with liberal amounts of maple syrup.  ANYTHING…

But, alas, I could only finish half my 4” stack.  That’ll teach me.

Pressing onwards, with much fuller bellies, we decided to all go to a local discount shopping store before we split up and headed our own ways.  The store was: Century 21.  Before we went in, we agreed to meet back outside in an hour.  An hour, that’s way long enough to spend shopping right.  I mean, I’m a guy.  I hate shopping.  For clothes.  (Books on the other hand…)  Personally, I was thinking I’d probably be waiting outside long before the hour was up.

But this was all before we went in.  Into the hallowed church to rampant consumerism gone mad, that is Century 21.

Lordy.  Lordy, lordy, lordi.  Just before the first hour was up, Elle came to find me to say her and Mum needed more time.  I agreed.  I had covered maybe ¼ of the first floor of the men’s section so far.  And that was before I found the clothes I LIKED!

To cut a long story short, we ended up spending over 4 hours in there.  I saved, SAVED, over US$800.  I ended up with 16, no wait, 17 different items.  And that was after I forced myself to cull out a whole basket of things I wanted, but didn’t reeeeeeally need.  I now own actual designer label clothing.  INSANE.  I swear they play some crazy subliminal mind-altering music in there or something.  I could have easily spent a whole day in there.  And I HATE clothes shopping.

Mind you, I mainly ended up with shirts and sweaters.  I still hate shopping for pants.  It’s, well, pants.  Anything you can try on there and then and check in a mirror, I’m fine with.  Anything where you have to go into a little room to change, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm for.

So, so much for our ‘on your own’ plans.  By this time it was late afternoon.  We sent Mum on a subway up to visit the fricken Frick collection, and took all the shopping bags back to the apartment.  Went through and tried everything on again, and then tried not to think about how I’d manage to pack it all in.  That was a problem best left till tomorrow morning right?

Elle and I then went and spent a little time by ourselves in the local area shops.  Cos you know, I needed to buy some more stuff, right?  Anyway, no prizes for telling where I was headed.  To the Strand, 18 miles of books baby, yeah!  I could have happily spent a whole week in there.  There were books literally everywhere, floor to ceiling.  And very reasonably priced!  But I managed to control my book addicted reflexes, given that I was already pretty sure at this stage that I might not have any more room to pack anything else.  I did buy a t-shirt though.  More clothes, good thinking.

Given that it was our last night in NY, we wanted to go out and sample the nightlife.  So Mum was going to see Momma Mia (or Mumma Moi-a as we would pronounce it), and Elle and I were going drinking.  We had arranged to meet a couple of people (friends of friends), the first at a comedy club on the upper East Side.

It turns out that you have to allow a little more time than you might think to get around in NY and we were half an hour late.  Luckily the friend of a friend was still waiting, so after much apologising we went into the club.  It was amazing going in seeing all the photos of the famous comedians who had trod the boards there.  We ordered drinks, and then some food.

From the 4 main food groups of pretzels, peanuts, popcorn, or nachos, we went with nachos.  Which in America, means corn chips with day-glo orange cheese drizzled (how they hell do you drizzle cheese anyway?)  over them.  Which somehow retains it’s heat for an unnatural period of time.  Like, hours.  But I was hungry after all that shopping, so hoed into them anyway.

I stayed for three comedians, who were all really funny.  Interesting seeing the different styles.  I liked the first one we had best, she had some great material.  Nothing like some rough sex jokes to get the crowd going…  After that I had to sneak away to meet up with Bill, a friend of Sara V’s.  He was going to meet me outside the subway station on 110th St (at the top of the park).  Only problem was, he was meeting me at the station on the Red line, over on the west side of the park.  And we had come up on the green line, on the east side of the park.  And for some retarded reason, there’s no circular line in the NY subway system.

No problem I thought, I’ll be clever and take the green line up to 110th St, and then walk across the top of the park to where the red station is.  Or catch a cab, I mean, they’re everywhere in NY.  Notice I said across the top of the park…  I’m not dumb enough to try to walk through the park at night, I’ve seen CSI.

So I get off at 110th St, and walk up the stairs.  Keep in mind that I’m dressed nicely for going out, but nothing too fancy, just jeans and a short sleeve shirt with a colour.  Well, to put it nicely, I kind of stood out…  Once I got outside, I could see I’d made a mistake.  I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to walk across the park anymore.  And there were no taxis.  Crap.  I figured it might be busier a block over, so I walked up the street and then across to the next avenue.

Which had no streetlights.

So I walked quickly back to the subway entrance, figuring the best thing to do would be to catch it a stop back towards civilization and electric power.  But then I saw a taxi go past, followed quickly by another one!  They DO drive up here I thought, and went and waited on the roadside.  Not being able to pull off that cool whistle like in the movies (and not wanting to draw any more attention to myself), I waved frantically at the next one I saw coming past, and thankfully it pulled over.

I told him to drive over to the subway station on the west side and was greeted with a blank look, so I pulled out the trusty street map (best purchase for NY ever!) and found the avenue that 100th intersected with.  That’s the best way to direct cabs in NY we discovered.  After we told one to take us to 45 West 9th St, and realised we were headed up towards 45 and 9th.  Or something.  Who knows where the hell he was going actually.

But that was another taxi on a different day.  Meanwhile, back on the way to 100th St we drove past the areas I was considering walking past.  Yeah.  Probably just as well I didn’t try that plan, I might not be around to write this journal entry.  Very dodgy.

But never mind, things worked out for the best.  By the time I arrived at the subway station, I was running about 15 mins late, so was running round like an idiot trying to find this guy I’d never actually met or seen a picture of.  I wasn’t having much luck till I tried going down into the station I was meant to be coming up out of, and overheard some guy telling the station attendant he thought he had sent someone to the wrong station.  “No”, I said, “your instructions were fine, I just managed to bollocks it up by myself.”  I had found Bill.

Much relieved, I needed a beer.  And so did Bill, apparently he’d been at school for 12 hours or something crazy.  So we headed over a block to his local bar, and we had some beers and met a few of his friends.  Good times.  Especially considering that these beers were in addition to the two I’d had at the comedy club (two drink minimum – at $8 per bottle, wtf?)  Somehow I managed to communicate well enough to enable Elle to come meet us later on.  I stressed, and I do mean stressed, that she should take a cab straight from the comedy club.

I could have happily stayed there till closing, but we were leaving the next day, and Mum and Elle had to get up early to catch some dodgy bus to Boston.  I think by the time we left we’d helped organise a cross America roadtrip to document the changing political landscape through interviewing people using the different mediums of video, tape, and text.  Bill seemed pretty keen to emulate the start of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as well.  Not too sure about the ether though.

Oh, and we discovered a shared love for the cinematic masterpiece which is Point Break.  Although I’m not quite to the point where I can ask someone to give me a point in time during the movie, and then quote the next line.  Bill is though.  Bastard.

So anyway, we left the pub and headed for the subway, which was still running at 2:30am, way to go New York!  We struck up a conversation with a charming young black guy who was just back for a break from doing his PhD at Cambridge.  He was back to ‘keep it real’.  We discussed the differences between New York, Cambridge, and NZ.  Fascinating conversation (from what I remember.  I’m not sure I contributed all that much), and an entrancing example of the random but great way that New York continually surprised me.

We made it home fine, and saw that Mum had also made it okay.  I think if I go back I’d hire a cellphone while in the US.  It has certainly been nice having the freedom that being without one can provide, but there’s been times it sure would have come in handy.

We woke up at 7am, so had basically had 4 hours sleep.  It seemed like so much less!  I think I’d had a little bit too much to drink, and wasn’t feeling much like moving.  Luckily my flight wasn’t till 12:30 so I had a bit more time to get organised.  Although I did help Elle and Mum take their bags down to the street and hail a cab, being a seasoned pro at it by now (after two times).

As much as I felt like curling up into a ball and dying, I had to get a move on, so showered and started to pack.  Oh, how I wished I had packed before we went out the night before.  I really had bought way too much at Century 21 and was getting stressed about fitting it all in.  And the packing was not going quickly.  Standing up was hard work, and even sitting was feeling a bit wobbly.  Every couple of minutes required a trip to the bathroom as I felt like I was going to throw up.

Somehow it took me over two hours to pack my bag, and I was getting a bit freaked out that I was going to miss my plane.  I was planning first on catching a shuttle, but it was way too late for that.  The next plan as time went b was to taxi to the bus station and catch an airport bus.  Again, that time came and passed.  The packing and nausea continued…  Typically, just after I’d packed away my toiletries bag with toothpaste and mouthwash in it, I was violently ill.  And instantly felt SOOO much better!  Finished packing in a few minutes, and after checking under the beds, rushed out the door.  And rushed back in to close the window I’d left open.  And rushed out again, and down the stairs, with my bag weighing a million freakin tons.

Oh crap, I was thinking, now I have to go try and hail a cab, what if I can’t find one?!

I stepped out the door of the apartment, and saw two taxis directly in front.  Awesome!  Chucked my bags in the first one, and off we sped.  Sped being the operative word.  This guy was out of his mind crazy.  We were literally outracing ambulances and fire trucks.  I think he liked me as he’d been to Wellington once, so made it his mission to get me to La Guardia on time.  He did lecture me a lot on how I hadn’t left enough time, that there would be heaps of traffic, blah blah blah, which I was in no mood to hear, but couldn’t reply as I was just trying not to throw up anymore.

So after much ducking, weaving, illegal charges through red lights, protracted swearing in Russian (I think?) at larger trucks, and driving far too fast, we made it to the airport with heaps of time.  Ironically (well to my mind at least), the cab fare was over double what Mum and Elle had paid to catch the bus to Boston.  How the hell does that work?  But I didn’t care, I’d made it, and went in to check in.

Most of the airports we’ve been in on the trip now have an ‘express’ check-in terminal, similar to the Air NZ electronic ticket kiosks.  Still thinking I was in a hurry, I figured the ‘express’ route was the way for me.

By the time I was finished, everyone who was in the line for the regular check-in when I got there, plus two more people who turned up after me had been processed.  Express my ass.

Still, I now had my bag checked, and my boarding pass in hand.  I wandered off to the security screening, as I figured it would take a while.  It went pretty quick, but was annoying.  I had to take off my shoes, and my belt, and take my laptop out of my bag, and open every bag, put my change in the tray, and about a million other retarded things I was in no mood for.

After my odorous boots had been deemed non-threatening, and I’d restrained myself from bludgeoning everyone in the vicinity to death with my laptop, I could go relax.  There was still a half hour or so till we were boarding, so I grabbed a drink and something to eat (just in case my appetite returned), and went to sit down.  Then realised I hadn’t got anything to give to Hayley to say thanks for picking me up from the airport and letting me crash at her place.

Fortunately there was a duty-free shop right by my gate.  Alcohol, I thought, everyone likes alcohol.  So I was glancing over what they had, and to my great surprise and delight, saw 42 Below Vodka sitting there!  So now I could not only get her alcohol, I could get her something from NZ at the same time.  Awesome!  Sadly they didn’t have my favourite, the Feijoa one, but they had Manuka honey, which I thought was more kiwi and interesting that just the plain one, so got that.

Sat down, relaxed (finally), and tried not to fall asleep.  Then we boarded, and I discovered the most annoying airline in the world, Air Canada.  I was flying from New York to Toronto, as was everyone else on the plane (of course).  But they still insisted on making everything bi-lingual.  And I don’t mean English and Canadian, I mean English and French.

Now, you now how tedious and annoying all the pointless ‘safety’ announcements are in English (how to put on the life jacket, how to find the nearest exits, how to suck eggs, etc).  Imagine having to listen to all of those, twice.  First in English, then in French.  And not hot, sexy, French french.  Annoying, regional Quebexoisian French.  Gak.

It probably wasn’t that bad, but I was getting annoyed as they kept interrupting the in-flight entertainment all the time to say stuff.  Which meant I was getting interrupted in the middle of Family Guy (the awesome episode where they go down South on the witness protection program).  The in flight entertainment was really good actually, all touch screen based (which was a bit unresponsive, but better than nothing), and you could play anything on demand.  After watching Family Guy I saw the guy sitting next to me was watching Mission Impossible 3 and was at about the same point I was at on the flight over.  So I started that, and fast forwarded it up to where I’d left off.  Was feeling quite pleased with myself, and figured I’d at least to get to see how it ends this time, until once again, another interruption, this time to inform us we were 20 minutes ahead of schedule and about to start the descent and that the movies would be turned off.

Pants.

It’s not like I’m even enjoying the movie, it’s a big load of bollocks, but I just want to see how it ends.  Why can’t I just see how it ends!

Anyway, it all worked out okay, we landed early and by the time I’d cleared customs Hayley had just arrived to meet me.