the rest of the NY trip and stuff

So, New Year's Day, I spent the afternoon catching up with Ben Hsu, who I hadn't actually seen since we graduated CMU, but he's in NYC now and he likes baseball so he wanted to catch up while I was in town.  We met up at the Strand but got lunch at some other place nearby and chatted about a whole bunch of random crap, and after that I went to the Strand and raided their baseball books and came out relatively unscathed with only 4.

I went to see Book of Mormon that night, I'd gotten a single ticket to it a month or two ago when we planned this entire shenanigans; everyone else waited too long so no normal tickets were really available.  (And back in September when the SF shows went on sale it sold out in an hour.  Sheesh.)  My seat was three rows from the back of the O'Neill theater but it was still reasonable; I'm not actually sure whether I'd go to see this musical again though, to be honest.  Don't get me wrong, it's very good, and I totally recommend seeing it, but it was a very odd experience to be in this audience with all of these older conservative-seeming theater-going folks who are by nature not the kind of people who you'd expect to be laughing at jokes about African people having sex with frogs in order to
cure AIDS, but there you have it. It's very crass, offensive, irreverent, and everything you expect from the South Park guys.  Definitely not the kind of musical you go see with your mom. But I mean, it has tap-dancing and big dance numbers and solos and a happy ending, so... oh, and of course I played the "look in the Playbill for the CMU graduates" game and found out that the guy playing Elder McKinley, Rory O'Malley, is a CMU '03 grad, and apparently the original Elder Cunningham, Josh Gad, was ALSO from CMU '03.  And they were roomates at CMU.  Go figure.  There was another CMU guy in the cast named Tommar Wilson who graduated in my class, but he didn't play a big role in this.

I'd actually purposefully walked up and down Broadway to take pictures of Times Square, and stopped in a random deli for dinner after the show.  I think I might have been in that exact deli several years ago, it felt very familiar.  Or maybe a lot of NYC deli/shops look the same.

Came back, the guys (by then just Mark and Jay) were playing Through the Ages.  Whee.

Jay left in the morning of the 2nd, and I spent that day hanging out with jcreed.  I first got brunch at Shopsin's, which is this insane diner-like thing inside the Essex Market.  Mark had told me it was crazy good and had 800 choices on the menu; these were both true, but I expected a bigger place, I guess I hadn't listened to the part about "this is Kenny Shopsin's hobby not business", so there's literally seating for like 20 people maybe, they only handle 4 orders at a time, etc, so there's a huge line and they're only open 10am-2pm.  Crazy.  But I had a breakfast tray that had chocolate french toast and butterscotch s'mores pancakes and something called a "sneaky pete" which was bread and eggs and things.  Pretty yummy.

Met up with Jason near there and we went uptown towards the Museum of Math, and his girlfriend met us there.  I had heard about MoMath because they threw a puzzle hunt for their opening.  And of course, who doesn't like math?  The door handles to get in are in the shape of pi, even!  But the actual museum is not that established yet and so it is mostly puzzles and toys for kids to play with, more than anything else.  There were a few cool things like fractal machines and a tricycle that had square wheels driving on a rounded bumpy road, and a thing where you had to assemble shapes and see what path they took when rolling.  I had kind of hoped for more equations and history and whatnot, but there wasn't so much of that.  Maybe in the future.  They had a machine that you could make a Momath logo on and in the future you'll be able to print your own custom t-shirt from it.  So, yeah.

We spent the next few hours basically cafe-hopping; first walking to Koreatown and to a restaurant there, and then to a Gregorys Coffee, and then K had class to go to so Jason and I went to Carmine's, since I really wanted to go there and knew from past experience that you really can't go alone.  We first walked to the one in Times Square but it had an hour wait; we called the one on the Upper West Side and they were like "We can make you a reservation in an hour or you can basically just walk in," so we went up there and basically just walked in.  Got a gigantic plate of rigatoni and some garlic bread and had enough leftovers for days and days and days.  Alas.  It was still good.  I wish I could have gone there with a bigger group to eat more of the food, but it just didn't work out.  And either way it was great to have a lot of time to spend with Jason, so whatever.  I hope we continue to end up in the same city every now and then and catch up and all.

So the next day was Jan 3rd, Thursday, and my plan for the day was originally to tour Yankee Stadium with Ken and then head out of town, except that 1) it was 30 degrees out and 2) all the tours after 12pm sold out and Ken is also a late riser.  So we made plans instead to go to the New York Transit Museum, which Jason had told me about, and I'd also gotten a message from Sam Kass asking if I'd want to get lunch while I was in town, so I said "sure, how about Thursday?" so we met up right by the World Trade Center site and got pizza.  It's really funny because I hadn't seen Sam in like... years, we couldn't even remember the last time.  Though he worked at Maya/GD with my friends, so I have a feeling like I must have seen him in Pittsburgh at some point in the mid-2000's.  I told him stories about Japan and how the crazy kids are there playing Rock-Paper-Scissors and he told me some of the funny stories that have happened since Big Bang Theory put on his and Karen's RPS-Spock-Lizard variant.  Afterwards, I wanted to view the WTC stuff, so he got me into the Goldman-Sachs building as a guest and we went up to a cafeteria with a great view of it all, so I could see the construction of the new buildings and everything.  And then I walked to the ferry and the Irish Potato Famine memorial, took some photos, and yeah.  Great timing that it all worked out.

Then I took a train to Brooklyn and the train museum, and met up with Ken.  Oddly, the museum is in what used to be a train station, Court St, so you have to go down into it as if you are entering a station, and I missed the entrance.  It's very very cool, there are all these things about the history of the NY subway system, and a whole section on the evolution of trolleys, and buses, and how the city went from horsecars to elevated trains to trolleys to subways and so on.  Lots of great old things like signs and bus models and parking meters and whatnot, and then there's a whole section about Miss Subways, which I'd never even heard of.  The downstairs area is the old Court St. station platform and there are TONS OF TRAINS!  You can walk through most of them, anything from Brooklyn Transit cars from 1910 or so, to newer MTA trains, the most amusing thing in most of them is the old advertisements, for products like Lifebuoy and Uneeda and Burma Shave and whatnot, or old cars or old plays (like Hamlet productions from the 1920's), or the WWII-era ads are REALLY disturbing in some ways, like "let's defeat the nips and the nazis" or one about German and Japanese immigrants needing to register.  I liked walking through all the trains and sitting down in them and lounging around, it was nice.  Until they called "15 more minutes open" and we went quickly through the rest, then went to the store and I got shirts for the line J and the line 7.

We went to a place called Junior's after that, ostensibly for cheesecake, but Ken decided to get matzah ball soup so I got blintzes.  They were HUGE but probably the most tasty blintzes I've ever had in my life.  And the cheesecake was also as awesome as promised.  I didn't mean to eat so much, especially not after the stromboli I had for lunch, but in the end this worked out because then I didn't need to eat dinner, really.

Went back to Mark's, packed up my stuff, charged my phone, ordered an Amtrak ticket, and then I went to Penn Station and got on an Acela train to Philly.  That was super-comfortable, I don't think I've been on the Acela before or at least not in many years.

My uncle Jack picked me up from 30th Street and I came back here and caught up with him and my aunt, a little with my cousin Melissa who is here on break from Pitt, meeting my other cousin Eric's dog who now lives here, and then I stayed up late watching TV and fell asleep around 2-3am.  It was a little weird because I'm staying in Eric's old room, and even though he doesn't live here anymore it's still full of his stuff, but he's big into sports, especially Philly sports, so there's a lot of interesting old football/baseball/hockey stuff around to look at.

Anyway, I've just been hanging out here for the afternoon; I had to do laundry in the morning anyway.  I'm going to get a ride to SEPTA in a bit and then go downtown to see the Music Man with Stewart (another one of those people I catch up with once a year when we're in the same city).  Whee.