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I'm in New York!
As I write this, Phil and Kay are talking Magic with Mark, Jay is asleep on the other couch, Dian is goofing off on a laptop, and I'm not actually sure where the heck Brian is.
So basically a whole lot of us converged on NYC this weekend; I took a redeye in Friday night (caught up with Kuibbles for dinner beforehand and he rode the BART with me to the airport) and got in super-early Saturday morning. I've had a sinus infection or something for the last few weeks, and went to a doctor on Wednesday who prescribed some stuff for me including antibiotics. I hadn't taken them yet, so the flight was nightmarish, with the dry air and all I was coughing up a storm the entire time and couldn't sleep. Got here, climbed up the 6 flights of stairs to Mark's apartment, and decided to go ahead and take the antibiotics. Napped for a bit, and then we all (well, minus Jay, he was out doing something else) went out for a late-ish lunch at a place called Katz's Delicatessen. Split a fantastic corned beef sandwich and latkes with Mark. After that we all came back to the apartment and played Qwirkle (well, all being minus Dian and Mark but plus Jay), we had talked about boardgames but that's all we did. Then for dinner, despite it being fairly soon, we went to a place Mark had talked about called Mehtaphor, which was a tapas place run by a cook named Mehta (go figure). We had a ton of random little dishes which were all fantastic. Our waiter saw my CMU t-shirt and it turned out he was like "I was going to go to CMU for musical theater but went to Michigan instead," and we're like "Oh, we're all a bunch of engineering nerds," and I'm like Michigan... asked if he'd gone there with Darren Criss and it turned out he was a year ahead of him. Whee.
After dinner we went to an extremely loud bar, and after THAT we went to karaoke, from like midnight to 3am. It was a private-room Japanese-style place down the street from Mark, run by Koreans, but they had no Japanese songs on the system we were using. Doh. I sang a whole bunch of random stuff in English all of which has been on Glee I think, because I'm really out of touch with English music beyond that. Despite me having this horrible cold/cough/etc I sounded reasonably good, I think... I'm really not used to karaoke American-style, I'm used to going Japanese-style with like, Kozo or Pau or Ai or Carl or other friends who can really sing and we're all working on getting better at stuff... I don't entirely know what to do when it's like "let's put in some random songs and scream into the mic and get really drunk". It's not like I have that great a voice, but I try to make the most of what I have, at least. And of course I don't drink. Wonder if I could find similar people to go sing with sometime.
But anyway, yeah, we were out super-late and remember I was redeyed and sick and all, so basically we came back and slept.
Phil and Kay and Jay all got up early and went to MOMA today. Brian and Dian, not sure what they did. Mark slept in and did chores I think, and I got up at 2:30pm! Glorious sleep. So yeah, didn't accomplish much today before meeting up with everyone for "lunch/dinner" at 4pm, we were at a fancy Mexican place called Rosa Mexicana, where the highlight of the meal was tableside-prepared guacamole which was FANTASTIC. Oh yeah, we also met up with Lacey and her husband Tim for this, but minus Jay again, so 8 people at the table.
After dinner was Sleep No More, which is a... play, I guess. It's more like an interactive drama that takes place in a bunch of converted clubs/warehouses, it's like 5 stories tall and there are a ton of rooms of all sorts of things, everything is decorated in like, 1930sish ways. Overarcing the plot of Macbeth is going on, though told in a 1930's style. However it's never really clear WTF is going on a lot of the time. Oh, so when you go in, you get a mask, and all the "guests" wear masks and aren't allowed to speak. The actors have no masks and are allowed to speak but mostly they don't speak, a lot of scenes are just acted out with them doing stuff. It's often really hard to figure out what's going on even if you know the plot of Macbeth. (And there is some other plot going on here too, involving some lady with a locket and a porter and a tailor and stuff, that has nothing to do with Macbeth.) Anyway, early on Mark found me and took me to see a scene that was basically a rave representing one of the scenes with the witches in Macbeth, and after that I wandered around a lot. I saw some of the Macbeth plot points like the king being killed, Lady Macbeth wandering around crazy, the dinner scene, some fights between Macbeth and people like Macduff, some weird scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, some scenes with the witches that were just doing weird shit all over, and then a bunch of things involving the tailor guy and the locket lady. I don't know, Mark had described all of these crazy things that might happen like getting pulled into rooms with actors and whatnot, but nothing weird happened to me at all except that I apparently got to see one "rare scene" that involved Malcolm and Macduff planning to kill Macbeth (but all I saw it as was a weird side room that 3 of us guests had stepped into where we watched two men dancing around a chair, mock-fighting, and swinging a hanging ceiling lamp back and forth) because I happened to follow the right person into the right room at the right time before they slammed the door, and then I was part of a group of people who decided to raid the candy shop. (There's a candy shop in the 1930's town area, the first time I was in there the tailor guy offered me and some of the other guests candy after we followed him in; the next time I was in there, late in the show, a bunch of guests were basically opening all of the candy jars and taking some.)
I'm not sure what I thought of it in general. I'd probably go back if I was in NYC and someone wanted to go with me, and maybe I'd have a slightly better idea of where to go and what to do. I apparently missed an entire big scene involving a ball, but it sounds like I saw most of the other scenes DESPITE that after the first hour I got sick of chasing actors up stairs and through rooms -- the real problem is that any interesting actors would just have like 30-40 people following them and so you easily get lost in the shuffle or can't see what's going on anyway. So I started just exploring the place and often, I'd be in a room looking through stuff and then actors would come in and do something. One silly thing was that when I wanted to go to the bathroom I had no idea what to do, wasn't sure if I was allowed to speak to the black-masked "aides" or not, so I just decided to take 15 minutes finding my way out of the place to the "hotel lobby". Apparently there ARE bathrooms around the route but you have to find out where they are from people inside. Oops.
After the play, we took cabs back here and went to a bar Mark likes called Burp Castle, which has a policy where you HAVE to be quiet and the bartender will often shush people if it gets too loud, which is pretty crazy. We also bought fries from a Pommes Frites place around the corner with tons of dipping sauces. I drank water because there was no non-alcoholic stuff, shrug. We talked about the show and other stuff.
Now we're back up here.
I guess my remaining plans in NYC involve going to Django's for new year's eve tomorrow night and then hopefully seeing jcreed sometime as well... and I want to go to the museum of math. And the Strand. And Carmine's. Hmm.
So basically a whole lot of us converged on NYC this weekend; I took a redeye in Friday night (caught up with Kuibbles for dinner beforehand and he rode the BART with me to the airport) and got in super-early Saturday morning. I've had a sinus infection or something for the last few weeks, and went to a doctor on Wednesday who prescribed some stuff for me including antibiotics. I hadn't taken them yet, so the flight was nightmarish, with the dry air and all I was coughing up a storm the entire time and couldn't sleep. Got here, climbed up the 6 flights of stairs to Mark's apartment, and decided to go ahead and take the antibiotics. Napped for a bit, and then we all (well, minus Jay, he was out doing something else) went out for a late-ish lunch at a place called Katz's Delicatessen. Split a fantastic corned beef sandwich and latkes with Mark. After that we all came back to the apartment and played Qwirkle (well, all being minus Dian and Mark but plus Jay), we had talked about boardgames but that's all we did. Then for dinner, despite it being fairly soon, we went to a place Mark had talked about called Mehtaphor, which was a tapas place run by a cook named Mehta (go figure). We had a ton of random little dishes which were all fantastic. Our waiter saw my CMU t-shirt and it turned out he was like "I was going to go to CMU for musical theater but went to Michigan instead," and we're like "Oh, we're all a bunch of engineering nerds," and I'm like Michigan... asked if he'd gone there with Darren Criss and it turned out he was a year ahead of him. Whee.
After dinner we went to an extremely loud bar, and after THAT we went to karaoke, from like midnight to 3am. It was a private-room Japanese-style place down the street from Mark, run by Koreans, but they had no Japanese songs on the system we were using. Doh. I sang a whole bunch of random stuff in English all of which has been on Glee I think, because I'm really out of touch with English music beyond that. Despite me having this horrible cold/cough/etc I sounded reasonably good, I think... I'm really not used to karaoke American-style, I'm used to going Japanese-style with like, Kozo or Pau or Ai or Carl or other friends who can really sing and we're all working on getting better at stuff... I don't entirely know what to do when it's like "let's put in some random songs and scream into the mic and get really drunk". It's not like I have that great a voice, but I try to make the most of what I have, at least. And of course I don't drink. Wonder if I could find similar people to go sing with sometime.
But anyway, yeah, we were out super-late and remember I was redeyed and sick and all, so basically we came back and slept.
Phil and Kay and Jay all got up early and went to MOMA today. Brian and Dian, not sure what they did. Mark slept in and did chores I think, and I got up at 2:30pm! Glorious sleep. So yeah, didn't accomplish much today before meeting up with everyone for "lunch/dinner" at 4pm, we were at a fancy Mexican place called Rosa Mexicana, where the highlight of the meal was tableside-prepared guacamole which was FANTASTIC. Oh yeah, we also met up with Lacey and her husband Tim for this, but minus Jay again, so 8 people at the table.
After dinner was Sleep No More, which is a... play, I guess. It's more like an interactive drama that takes place in a bunch of converted clubs/warehouses, it's like 5 stories tall and there are a ton of rooms of all sorts of things, everything is decorated in like, 1930sish ways. Overarcing the plot of Macbeth is going on, though told in a 1930's style. However it's never really clear WTF is going on a lot of the time. Oh, so when you go in, you get a mask, and all the "guests" wear masks and aren't allowed to speak. The actors have no masks and are allowed to speak but mostly they don't speak, a lot of scenes are just acted out with them doing stuff. It's often really hard to figure out what's going on even if you know the plot of Macbeth. (And there is some other plot going on here too, involving some lady with a locket and a porter and a tailor and stuff, that has nothing to do with Macbeth.) Anyway, early on Mark found me and took me to see a scene that was basically a rave representing one of the scenes with the witches in Macbeth, and after that I wandered around a lot. I saw some of the Macbeth plot points like the king being killed, Lady Macbeth wandering around crazy, the dinner scene, some fights between Macbeth and people like Macduff, some weird scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, some scenes with the witches that were just doing weird shit all over, and then a bunch of things involving the tailor guy and the locket lady. I don't know, Mark had described all of these crazy things that might happen like getting pulled into rooms with actors and whatnot, but nothing weird happened to me at all except that I apparently got to see one "rare scene" that involved Malcolm and Macduff planning to kill Macbeth (but all I saw it as was a weird side room that 3 of us guests had stepped into where we watched two men dancing around a chair, mock-fighting, and swinging a hanging ceiling lamp back and forth) because I happened to follow the right person into the right room at the right time before they slammed the door, and then I was part of a group of people who decided to raid the candy shop. (There's a candy shop in the 1930's town area, the first time I was in there the tailor guy offered me and some of the other guests candy after we followed him in; the next time I was in there, late in the show, a bunch of guests were basically opening all of the candy jars and taking some.)
I'm not sure what I thought of it in general. I'd probably go back if I was in NYC and someone wanted to go with me, and maybe I'd have a slightly better idea of where to go and what to do. I apparently missed an entire big scene involving a ball, but it sounds like I saw most of the other scenes DESPITE that after the first hour I got sick of chasing actors up stairs and through rooms -- the real problem is that any interesting actors would just have like 30-40 people following them and so you easily get lost in the shuffle or can't see what's going on anyway. So I started just exploring the place and often, I'd be in a room looking through stuff and then actors would come in and do something. One silly thing was that when I wanted to go to the bathroom I had no idea what to do, wasn't sure if I was allowed to speak to the black-masked "aides" or not, so I just decided to take 15 minutes finding my way out of the place to the "hotel lobby". Apparently there ARE bathrooms around the route but you have to find out where they are from people inside. Oops.
After the play, we took cabs back here and went to a bar Mark likes called Burp Castle, which has a policy where you HAVE to be quiet and the bartender will often shush people if it gets too loud, which is pretty crazy. We also bought fries from a Pommes Frites place around the corner with tons of dipping sauces. I drank water because there was no non-alcoholic stuff, shrug. We talked about the show and other stuff.
Now we're back up here.
I guess my remaining plans in NYC involve going to Django's for new year's eve tomorrow night and then hopefully seeing jcreed sometime as well... and I want to go to the museum of math. And the Strand. And Carmine's. Hmm.