I know that hearing about other people's vacations can be capital b Boring, so I will spare you and only tell the stories of the ridiculous things we did.
Thing Number 1: Stay with a complete stranger
Being the starving college students that we are, Kristin and I opted to not get hotel reservations for anywhere we went and instead depend on the kindness of others for a place to sleep. Luckily we knew people in every city except NY! So we ended up staying with a man named Mbe who is Nigerian and in his late 30s! Not to mention, neither of us had ever met him before. I make that sound SOO sketchy. Haha. But Mbe is a really good friend of one of Kristin's current roommates, so that is how we got that hookup. Plus he is Mormon, so there is that automatic Mormon trust thing. He had such a sweet place. Here is the view from his apartment:
Yep, he lives on the corner of 110th and Central Park West on the 16th floor so his apartment literally overlooks the beauty of Central Park and then the city. It was awesome.
Thing Number 2: Sleep on the subway
Trying to save money and minimize the time that we would stay in a stranger's house, we bought a red-eye flight from Friday night to Saturday Morning. It left at 11 pm and got in at 7 am. We figured we would be fine after a crappy 7 hours of sleep to go explore the city. What we didn't realize that with the time change, a crappy 7 hours of sleep was really a crappy 4 hours of sleep. So by 2 pm on Saturday afternoon, we were EXHAUSTED. Like incoherent strings of words and going into free museums just for the warmth and not knowing where we were. So we got on the subway for the sole purpose of taking a nap.
Because we were soo completely tired, and we had a Broadway play to go to that night, and we did NOT want to fall asleep for that (which is good because Memphis is now my favorite musical of the ones that I have seen).
We took a train as high as it would go, and then back downtown. The only problem is we got interrupted by some teenage boys who came on to sing/play the guitar to "Come Together" by the Beatles for money. And maybe I was just half-asleep, but they sounded really good.
I do remember saying to Kristin, "Do you know who sleeps on subways? Homeless people." And then she responded, "Well, in NYC, we are pretty much homeless."
We were completely fine, and nothing got stolen (except I was wearing a pair of really cheap dangly earrings that are now missing, but if someone stole those I'm too impressed to be mad), but still, I don't think I'll do that again.
Thing Number 3: Taking the Peep World bus.
On Monday afternoon, Kristin and I got ready to take a Chinatown bus from NYC to DC. We had looked up a super cheap bus that left from Penn Station that would take us from there to the Chinatown in DC. So we got ready to head to "Chinatown Express" for our trip. When we got there, it was a restaurant. A restaurant! We were there at about 1:10, we hadn't yet bought a ticket, and the bus we wanted was supposed to leave at 1:30. We frantically tried to find the bus and ask the Chinatown Express people if they knew where to go and figure out a way to get ourselves(and all of our stuff which we were carrying), over to DC. Kristin turned the corner on 33rd to see a bus that had DC 2 NY written on the side and a line of people. The bus was parked in front of this classy establishment:
It says Peep World, if you can't tell. It ended up being $30 as long as we paid the driver right then, and in cash, but we got on the bus and made it DC without stopping or danger of being raped. It was actually a really nice bus with free water and they played a really cheeeeeeesy Bruce Willis movie called Red on the way over. It was actually quite enjoyable, despite the mass amounts of stress before getting on the bus when we didn't know if we would be able to go on or not.
So besides those 3 stories, and the normal getting lost in the subway system stories, I only have normal tourist stories about how much I LOOOOVED the bagels or the street food or watching Memphis. Seriously, you should all go see Memphis. It won 4 Tony's last year, so you don't just have to take my word for it.
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