Wednesday 30th – A Multicultural Day

Wednesday was originally going to be beach day, but on being told that Del and Cam were going into the city, plans quickly changed. I feel like I’m only going to be in this country for a split-second of my life, so the thought of missing out on anything at all just doesn’t enter into my mind. And having to choose between sunning my pasty white chest on the beach and having some fun in Manhattan was an easy one.
So we got the train into the city around mid-day, and worked our way down to Little Italy straight away. We’d decided that we were going to go to a posh Italian restaurant and having a nice meal on a terrace with a nice glass of vino. But as usual, the plans went out the window and we just went to the first place with a good deal on lunch food. So we ended up having lunch in a tiny Italian diner that insisted on giving us a bottle of wine for the price of a couple of glasses of it. So post lunch, we strolled (slightly drunk) into Chinatown, which is quite literally next door to Little Italy. It’s really strange, like you’ve walked straight out of one country and into another one. On walking through Chinatown, I suddenly felt like I’d been down the same road before (literally), but somehow it was different. Then I realised that I was walking down the same street I’d walked down at about 6am following the subway ordeal. Only then the streets were completely deserted, and this time they were absolutely packed with Chinese people. This made asking for directions to the nearest subway station really difficult though, so we walked back and forth along the familiar street until we eventually found the J line to take us up-town.


We spent the rest of the day at the cinema (when step-brothers comes out in the UK, it’s worth a look!), and in bars. In the evening we went uptown to the upper-west side and sat outside a Greek bar eating appetizers and drinking Sangria until the time came for us to miss our 11.16 train home. So we finished the night off in a nice roof-top bar that’s right outside Penn station, where we had a couple more beers and sang away a couple of hours to Michael Jackson.
I guess it was kind of a bad omen wearing my I♥NY t-shirt into the city (the same one I wore the time I fell asleep on the subway), but when people pointed out that I was wearing it again, I just ignored that. Bad move. Me and Cam fell asleep on the train on the way back to Locust Valley and missed our stop, eventually waking up at Oyster Bay (the end of the line). So we phoned Tim the taxi driver, who was happy to come and pick us up. But when he turned up, he wasn’t the only person in the taxi and we had to sit in on a half an hour round trip to some guy’s girlfriend’s house (which ‘guy’ didn’t really know the way to) before getting home.


I topped the night off by waking up Gillian on the way in with the words “Del, why the hell did you get off the train without us?!”. She was grouchy in the morning. Mind you, so was I – having to drag myself into work at 10.30am. It’ll be a while before I drink properly the night before working again. Probably.