Without A Word : Home Away From Home

I just got back from my trip to New York, NY and let me tell you, it was amazing! It was unlike any city I've ever explored before, just incredible. I've lived in a city before, a small city (Winnipeg) and I hated it, but New York.... New York I could see myself living in. I didn't want to leave, I didn't miss anything or anyone (sorry family), it just felt right you know? I wish I could live there, or at least live there part time. I will definitely be going back, again and again and again. If I could make it a yearly thing I most definitely would.

The flight there actually wasn't that bad, I get super motion sick, I hate flying. The flight back was a different story though. Anyway, we get to the airport in Winnipeg and everyone is super chipper (we got there in the morning before anyone had time to get pissed off), people were complimenting (my nails) and joking around with us (pretending there were problems with our boarding passes, oh you airport jokesters you!). We make it past security and go to get something to eat at TGI Fridays. It was gross and very onion filled. We make it onto the plane and fly down to Minneapolis where we had a connecting flight to New York. Once we touch down in New York we realize we hadn't planned out how exactly we were going to get to the hotel, we knew we didn't want to take a cab though because it was quite a distance away. As we are standing around looking like lost puppy tourists a man approaches us asking if we need a shuttle, well yes! Yes we do need a shuttle! So we shuttled it on down to the hotel in a van with the a nice young man. He's playing some kind of rap/R&B in his CD player and as we hop on in we notice it's skipping, so I kinda skip to the next song but it too is skipping, at that point I just leave it because I have no idea how New Yorkers act. Will this driver jump down my throat because I touched his dash? Will I get yelled at or called nasty names? Will we get kicked out? I had no idea. After he's done loading everyone in he gets in the van and notices his CD is skipping, says something along the lines of "aw man, it's skipping" and I, with the big mouth, say "ya I skipped to the next song for you but it was skipping too so I left it" Ya Des, that makes sense, be worried about how he'd react and yet outright tell him what you did!! What can I say, I'm honest... I guess? Stupid maybe? Anyway, he just laughs it off, turns it to radio and we are on our way. Well then! New Yorkers are nice, I decided that right then and there. As we start driving though I realize that New Yorkers drive ANYWHERE they want. You wanna be in two lanes at once? You go right ahead! You wanna cut someone off? You go right ahead! You wanna honk your horn in futile attempts? You go right ahead! You get the picture, I decided right then and there New Yorkers are crazy... nice, but crazy. We laugh and make some remarks about the driving in New York to the driver and he just goes on about how everyone is crazy (see, he even thought so... I did think he too was crazy but I didn't say as much. You never know how a crazy person is going to react to being called crazy :s )

*I'm going to interject right here to let you know this is going to be a

long post. I wanted to journal while in NY but didn't get the chance to so this is

my way of journaling to myself. So either suck it up and read or just skip to the pictures.

OR go to facebook and look at the pictures and click away cuz I already got

the "view" from you on my stats page muahahaha*

We make it to the hotel (oh it's night time just to paint a clearer picture for you), and it looks like this:

I don't really have pictures of the hotel room, it really wasn't anything special, like seriously, the bathroom was tinier then a 1 bedroom apartment's bathroom, and the rest of the room wasn't exactly super spacious. But the view from the hotel room (4th floor) looked like this:

Glamorous, I know. (even after Fergie did a song

spelling it out, I still have trouble spelling

glamorous)

Almost immediately after arriving in our hotel room we freshened up and got something to eat from the hotel cafe, then set out on foot to Times Square. We were only about half a block away from it, almost right away Elmo comes up to my friend Melissa wanting a picture, so she strikes a pose with elmo, as she's doing that another character came up to her and posed with her too. After the picture they asked her for money and not knowing thats how things worked she just said she didn't have any money and we quickly walked away lol. There were SO many people in Times Sq. I wonder if any of them were even true New Yorkers... probably not. Who would want to walk that square shoving through people and walking into shops with "I love New York" merchandise?! That's when we started to realize that not only do vehicles do whatever they want, so do people. People were walking eeeeeverywhere, and crossed streets whenever they pleased. They didn't need a lit up walking man to tell them when to move, they moved to their own liking dammit! I already knew I could fit in, drive how you want? Check. Walk when you want? Check. I came there with an already half adapted personality, all I needed to do was live there for a bit to completely adapt to my surroundings. Which wouldn't be hard, I am well on my way to eat, sleep and breathe New York. After seeing what Times Sq. had to offer we headed on down to Starbucks for some free wifi! Checked in with the people at home and went back to the hotel for the night.

After settling down for the night and gushing about how we couldn't believe we were actually in New York we all tried to get some sleep. As I'm laying in bed, trying to get comfortable with the too big pillow I start noticing the sounds outside. The walls in the hotel were like paper, we could hear the ding of the elevator clearly, people walking off and giggling or talking to each other. On the other side of the wall, the one facing the street we quickly realized we were indeed in the city that never sleeps. Delivery trucks were making their rounds, beep beep beeeeeeep as they reversed their big trucks. Garbage pick up as well, you could hear them breaking to slow down, the motor shifting gears at they sped up. And as I'm laying in my bed with my own thoughts I hear the quiet patter of hooves on a horse with a police man sure to be mounted atop it trotting on by and I smiled. As my smile grew larger it slowly turned into a laugh which got all three of us laughing before we all drifted off to sleep. That first night was horrible, among the noises all around us the beds and bedding weren't comfortable either. Thankfully in the days to come we'd be so exhausted from walking everywhere that we all slept pretty hard after that.

The sites that we saw were the Empire State building, Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, NBC Studio tour, Grand Central Terminal, T.V. and Movie tour, Brooklyn Bridge, and we did stumble upon ground zero but it wasn't actually in the plans so we didn't venture into that. Some random places we went to were Starbucks, Barney's (just to say we've been to Barney's), Serendipity (but only the entrance, they were packed and not taking reservations), Starbucks, a rotating restaurant (won't ever do that again- motion sickness), Magnolia Bakery, Forever 21, Starbucks, McGee's (McClaren's from How I Met Your Mother is inspired by McGees), Canal Street, Shake Shack, Smith's Restaurant, the subway (not to be confused with the restaurant), Olive Garden (best food I had out there, probably because it's familiar lol), touristy stores of course, oh and Starbucks.

Canal street was an interesting experience. Nellie was sitting beside a women on the plane who had said if we wanted to buy any knock off bags that Canal St. is the place to go. You say knock off and bags in the same sentence to me and I'm down without question! After we stumbled across the street on our way to the Brooklyn Bridge we decided to check out some of the shops. Our first shop experience definitely let us know the tone of the street. They come up to you and ask what you want, you take a look at the bags hanging and kind of hum and haw, then they ask "Do you like Micheal Kors?", C'mon lady, do we like Micheal Kors? Of course! So Melissa shows the most interest, this lady knows she's got Mel where she wants her. She tells her that they have any style she wants. Mel points to one bag and says, do you have a Micheal Kors that looks like this? The women says yes but it's in the back she has to go get it. Then proceeds to tell Mel the price to see if she will take it. Unknowing to the way this operation works Melissa tells the women she need to see the bag before she can commit. The women says ok it will just be a few minutes. As she tells her coworker to go "get" the bag we stand and look at the other merchandise. Then Nellie and Melissa notice that when she said "go get the bag" it actually meant- we'll take the style of bag you like and put a Micheal Kors label on it while you wait. When the bag is done the women shows Mel the bag, but she makes sure she keeps the bag low, almost under the counter. That's when it dawns on us that this isn't exactly legal. Melissa tries on the bag and as she is I'm watching this other women, she nervously glances around her just dying to quickly make this sale. Melissa however is still unsure and is taking her time. Melissa lets the women know she's leaning towards no and that's when the women quickly goes down in price. Melissa starts to barter with her, as they are bartering I notice that the women has put the bag back on the hook, the lowest hook and facing the label inward. Melissa gets her down to where she's comfortable and takes the bag. The women wastes no time in shoving the bag into a solid black bag, takes the cash and hands the bag over to Melissa. A look of relief on the women's face that she didn't have to house this bag after the label had already been put on it. I wonder if they would have thrown it out.

After Melissa's purchase we set out to find a knock off Louis Vitton bag for moi! We walk into a store and a women approaches me asking what I'm looking for. I tell her and she hands me off to a male co-worker. I tell him I'm unsure of the style I want and he shows me a card with all the styles that he gets from a binder in a stack of other binders. I point to one and he tells me he wants $80. I tell him I don't want to spend $80, he asks how much I do want to spend and my two friends tell him I want to spend around $30. He immediately walks away from me. So I take that as a no and we proceed to walk out of the store. As we're walking out the man taps me on the shoulder and says to me "you'll never get a bag with those two around" offended at him insulting my friends I ask why and he says "you're not going to find a Vitton for $30" I reply back with "ok" as I shoot him a 'your stupid' look and walk out quickly. Plus it smelled really bad in that store. In another store I tell the guy I want to spend $30 and he tells me "It's a Louis Vitton, $80 is a good deal" and I say "but it's not a real Vitton so that isn't a deal" and he just walked away from me. So that experience was very interesting to say the least. The next day I ended up finding a fake Vitton from a man with a table on the street corner. He tells me its $45, I say how about $40 (that's all I had on me and $40 was way better then $80 and still close to $30) he says deal and shoves my new bag into a solid blue bag for me to proudly walk away with a huge smile on my face!

I'll just post a few pictures now of our trip and just say a few things first. At Madame Tussaud's we actually got to touch the wax figures, this was espeically cool because in San Francisco they also have a wax museum (which isn't nearly as good) and you can't touch the figures. In the Empire State building we had gotten fast track passes, or so we thought, so we actually ended up staying in loooong lineups. That is what started our sore feet problems. We seriously walked everywhere, our feet were so sore after the first day and didn't get a chance to heal the whole trip. It was nice to be able to explore the city in that way but it was kind of a love/hate thing. If I go back to New York I wouldn't want to do the line ups at the Empire State again so if I were to go with someone who wanted to go there I'd be sure to buy the fast track, it is definitely worth it. I also wanted to say a bit about the subway. It was seriously so awesome! It was a lot cleaner then I thought it would be, still dirty, but a lot cleaner then I thought. It was like a whole other world underneath such a great city. It's hard to explain in words but each time you walk down into the subway each entry looks different. Sometimes it's small and cramped, other entries are huge and full of stairs and white tile. After going on it once we got the hang of it, it was super easy and also very cheap. I'd travel this way more so next time but I'd also like to know exactly where each entry to a subway is before I go. Sometimes it took a bit of walking around to figure out where one was. I thought it would be really creepy and sketchy but it really wasn't. All the people looked normal too so we were never scared or creeped out. When you line up to get onto the subway you gotta make sure you get on fast. Not only are there people walking off but there is people walking on and the doors don't stay open for long. Sometimes the subway conductor was really easy to understand but other times I had wished I was more like Lily and able to speak conductor (How I Met Your Mother reference). New York hot dogs from the hot dog cards on the streets are the best. Starbucks are almost literally on every corner. Roasted almonds and cashews from the carts on the streets are a must try. If someone tells you that you haven't experienced New York until you have been to Shake Shack you tell them they are a liar and walk away. You can't take photos in the NBC Studio's but honestly I'd say it isn't even worth going. You wont see a celebrity no matter how hard you wish it and it's only an hour of seeing about 2 sets and the control room. And not even having pictures to prove you were there? Not worth it to me anyway. We also so the Ghost Busters fire hall on our TV and Movie tour, along with the apartment from I Am Legend, where Beyonce and Jay-Z live, the Friends building, along with a lot of other buildings we drove too quickly by to take a decent photo- and if we did happen to get a half decent photo, forgot why we took it in the first place. Finding out New Yorkers were actually very nice was so awesome, at one point I was walking down the street without a jacket on and one women yelled at me "put your jacket on" and I replied "I'm hot!" and a man close by yelled out "I'll say!" highlight of my day for sure, thank you grungy oldish guy for appreciating my beauty! Every time we got bumped into people were saying sorry and excuse me, it was so refreshing to be away from the mennonite attitude. Listening to the people drumming on 5 gallon pails in the subway.

I think that is all I really wanted to say about New York, it was an amazing experience, it went by far too quickly but I know in my heart that I will be back and that makes me happy. Maybe I'll adopt an american child so that I could live there... does that work?