Note: This first post is REALLY long, but they get smaller after that. Feel free to skip to the second day if this gets too daunting.
The first day in New York actually started yesterday. Katrina and I arrived at the airport knowing that our flight would arrive in New York 5 hours ahead of our Airbnb check-in time. Plenty of time to kill. So when our plane took off 30 minutes late, no complaints. We flew JetBlue, which was pretty kind to us overall.
But! My seat was a hot mess. It was like the lower back of the chair was missing. If I stuck my hand down between the seat and the seat back, it was basically in the seat pocket that the person behind me was using. In fact, they were digging around in that pocket at one point and things got real friendly. The seat pad itself also wasn’t attached. If I tried to slouch down in the chair and slide my bum forward, the seat just slid forward with it. It is also worth noting that the buckle of one half of Katrina’s seatbelt was upside down and needed to be twisted around to be buckled, though she did not experience the disassembling of her seat that I did.
Anyway, I’ll try not to get hyper focused on details, but I can make no real promises there. The takeaway from the flight is that I slept maybe 45 minutes total. That’s pretty unusual for me. I can typically sleep anywhere. Planes are a bit more challenging, but I usually manage just fine. Not this time, I guess.
We landed only 6 minutes late. The pilot did us no favors there, making up time that we already considered well-wasted. Thanks for nothing, pilot. You know, other than getting us safely back on the ground. We hung around at baggage claim for a long time, putting contacts back in, finding a breakfast place online, getting Katrina’s riding-into-the-city makeup on, surreptitiously watching the two guards at the exit with automatic weapons. Normal airport things.
I passed out in the cab right away and slept through most of the hour-long trip into the city. Katrina kept vigil over me while I slept, except for when she was also asleep and then I for one am very glad that we had an honest cabbie who didn’t sell us while we were sleeping.
We had breakfast at the perfect place for our needs this morning. The cabbie dropped us off just after 10am. Our Airbnb host had let us know that we could actually check in at 11:30, so we only had an hour and a half to kill with breakfast. We ate at the Grey Dog. A guy immediately greeted us when we arrived and told us that you order at the counter and then find a place to sit yourself. But then he came back a minute later and said that he had reserved our table with a red bandanna and took our luggage to wait at the table for us. So nice! I had challah French toast. I don’t know that I’ll be posting all of my meals on here, but today gets some meal pics, so here’s breakfast:
We had a nice corner booth where we could hang out for as long as we needed. And we did.
After breakfast at the Grey Dog, we got checked into our 4-floor walk-up Airbnb apartment without issue. Priority number one for me for the afternoon was being in an advanced state of unconsciousness for as long as possible.
Once we had figured out the plan for the rest of the day, I went to sleep with a (what proved to be too gentle) alarm set for 2:30. Katrina went and got some sort of nail service at the salon downstairs and then also came back and slept.
I woke up two minutes after she did at 3:30. The extra time sleeping was not planned, but very welcome. The plan for the remainder of the day was to eat some cookie dough, take some pictures, and see a show. We successfully did just that.
Eating cookie dough There’s a place called DO (I don’t want to figure out how to add the accent mark that makes it be pronounced as “dough”) that sells various flavors of cookie dough as if it were ice cream. I got a single scoop of an oatmeal cookie dough with M&Ms. The serving lady made it a very generous scoop, so I ended up not finishing it all, but it was very good. Food pic:
We sat in the air-conditioned shop for a few minutes before leaving for our next stop. The weather had been very warm and muggy. The word on the street (the internet) though was that we would see thunderstorms this evening around 5pm. We headed to our next destination just before then.
Taking some pictures I have several friends who are traveling at the moment - Sara, Beth, Jill, Katrina, and myself (I can be my friend). When we realized this, we decided to all take a couple of pictures at the same time on the same day to be used for a collage. Here in NY, Katrina and I decided to go to the Friends building (the actual location of the building used as the exterior of the apartment in the tv show Friends). It was a relatively short walk from cookie dough to Friends. On the way, though, the promised bad weather began to arrive. The sky turned ominous and then a blustery wind whipped up all of the grit on the street and put it into my eyes. Some of it might have been left over for Katrina’s eyes too. This kept up for a bit with the occasional rain drop falling. We took our photos and then it became clear that the weather had gotten more serious about this whole rain situation. We hurried across the street to stand under the awning of the restaurant on the ground floor of the Friends building and it was soon pouring.
There was thunder and lightning. It was a lot of fun. We both had umbrellas which was a major planning win, because we passed many people in summery clothes drenched by the rain huddling in covered areas on our way back to the apartment and then to our first show of the trip.
Bonus story (“bonus” because I tried to gloss over this one part of the day for brevity’s sake, but then remembered that this had happened and had to go back and put it in) When we stopped back at the apartment, we walked up three flights of stairs to find that apartment 4B was in the place that 4A, our apartment, was supposed to be in. 4A was across the hall. It was baffling. I’ve never heard of the scam where you convince travellers to leave all of their stuff at your apartment AND THEN MOVE THE WHOLE APARTMENT! Our keys wouldn’t work on either 4A or 4B, but we tried long enough at 4B that the occupant came to the door. It turns out that we were in the wrong building. It was almost identical inside and was only a couple of doors down from our actual building. HOW DID OUR KEY EVEN GET US IN THAT BUILDING?!?!
Seeing a show After a lot of back and forth over the past weeks, we finally decided that we would both see the play Children of a Lesser God. The main draw for me here is that ASL would be heavily used in the show. We bought digital rush tickets through the TodayTix app, so it was only $37.50, a steal for a Broadway show. Overall, the show was fine. Some positive call outs were the set design, use of ASL, and smooth scene transitions. Some negatives were the lead guy’s timing when verbally translating the lead gal’s signed lines and unnecessary use of odd music at certain points.
The real exciting part of the experience though was that there was a one-night-only talkback with the cast and with celebrity producer, Nyle DiMarco. He’s deaf and won America’s Top Model and then Dancing with the Stars. We snagged some great seats a couple of rows from the front for the talkback and then were still able to exit the theatre quickly afterward and get a good spot at the stage door. The cast did come out and sign Playbills even though it was already later than usual. Nyle was harder to catch, though. There were only three of us who waited long enough for him to finally come out. It can be hard to get pictures with people at stage doors and here is an example of that. I swear he actually looks like a model in talk like:
We had accomplished everything we had set out to do, so we went to The Meatball Shop for a well-earned, late dinner. This is a favorite place of ours on a Katrina and Jared trip to NY. I had what I think is my usual - classic meatballs with a Parmesan cream sauce on spaghetti. Like I said, this post gets food photos, so here was dinner:
After that, we just went back to the apartment, I created a blog, wrote this post, and went to bed sometime after 4:30am. That is what an eastward time zone change and a long afternoon nap gets you.
I'm going to justify the length of this post by saying that its length is symbolic of how long the day felt. I’ll plan for future days to be shorter and continue to make up excuses for long posts as needed.
(Also, I apparently left my umbrella on the subway at the end of the night.)