Hello. There is always something to write about, as I am not done recounting on what I did in Jordan, but clearly the inspiration to do so hasn’t not been there lately.
I am sick with a cold or something which began as a sore throat after a nighttime bus ride from New York to D.C on Sunday. Prottoy and I went to said places to visit some friends. I had been to New York twice before, first in 2005 with my high school band to sightsee and perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and second just last winter with my sister to fulfill my dream of watching an opera (Madame Butterfly) at the Met. That second time we also made an impromptu decision to stop by the ballet box office and see if we could get some cheap last minute tickets to the Nutcracker, which we did! We were a little bit late to the Nutcracker due to metro mix ups, and we had appropriately cheap balcony seats for both performances, which meant we had partial side-views of the stage, but both of the events were great and I was satisfied. I still need to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art someday. Also MoMA.
Anyway, I had done most of the touristy things in New York before this last trip and so was perfectly fine with just walking around and trying things which weren’t necessarily must-do’s in New York but still new. After arriving in the city in the afternoon and getting a little lost and sweaty (New York is sooo much more humid than Vermont, we met with the others in Washington Square Park and went to an Asian-style cafe for drinks, which increased my liking for bubble tea. Dinner was set to happen in an undecided Bengali restaurant since there is a large Bengali population in an area of Queens called Jackson Heights and none of us non-Bengalis in the group had eaten Bengali food before. Redwan’s childhood friend from Bangladesh who was in Queens for some reason served as our not-very-good guide. He almost had us eat in an Indian buffet because it was cheaper, but the majority’s desire to try Bengali food won over and we ended up in a little restaurant which served mostly authentic (according to the Bangladeshis) and good food. I had a heavily spiced fish. I’m obviously not an expert on this, since while I like South Asian food it is not my favorite, and I would not be able to tell much of a difference between Bengali and Indian food, but I think Bengali food might be a bit more acidic (than North Indian food). From what I hear, Bengali sauces are less dense than Indian ones, and everything in general is jucier.
After dinner we stopped at our not-very-good-guide Tahsin’s aunt’s place for water. His aunt is old and small and cute. Then we hung around on the crowded street for a bit while some smoked and some tried a weird mint-thing filled leaf called paan. Queens is an interesting place. It seems more crowded than Manhattan, the buildings are short and cramped and it’s dirty and its population is very diverse. Redwan said he felt like he was in Bangladesh, and Prottoy pointed out to me that the many red and green lighted advertisments on every building were also very common in Bangladesh. I had been there once before (on the other side of it) to wait for a bus to the LaGuardia Airport, and though I may be generalizing too much, that area looked exactly the same as Jackson Heights, leading me to think it is all like that.
Back in Manhattan, we watched Ted in Times Square. Having reached the theater at 10 something, we ended up having to wait until the 12:15 am showing because two of the girls were mistakenly given tickets to the Katy Perry movie and by the time they realized it, Ted had sold out. So we loitered in front of an escalator and played mafia. I was not a fan of Ted. The lead actor and the bear have a fight in which I was hoping they would both die. It did have some funny moments, but I think Ted would have been better as a stand up comedy act than a movie.
The next day, we woke up late and Sumi, Prottoy and I got on a bus to Morningside Heights in East Harlem to meet Anil and Gunit at a Mexican bakery that my sister and I discovered while we were staying in a nearby hostel last winter. To our surprise, Anil and Gunit actually got onto our same bus on one of its stops. The restaurant is called Mi Mexico Lindo y Querido, and it is on 2nd avenue between 116th and 117th streets. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall bakery, which has little seating space, racks of bread on one wall, and refrigerators with beverages on the other. Besides bread, they offer mostly antojitos, which means little cravings in Spanish, or items of food that you would make small, quick meals of, such as tacos, tamales and chilaquiles. I was very excited to have people try some authentic Mexican food, which most of them probably never had. It also seemed like a good follow up to our introduction to authentic Bengali food the previous day. We took the food to central park. I don’t think the Mexican food went over too well with everyone however, which made me a little disappointed. Nevertheless, I am happy to have shown my friends a bit of the difference between authentic Mexican flavors and their counterparts.
After finishing our lunch, we headed over to a karaoke bar. This was a very different experience for me, and I was a bit intimidated by the thought of singing karaoke in front of strangers and pretending to be happy. However, I was pleased to find that instead of my typical image of a smoky karaoke bar in which I would be peer pressured into going to mic and getting booed at or whistled at, in this place each group rented their own room with karaoke set for a while. So as we sat there and sang badly, we did not realize that we were cutting it dangerously close to a dinner appointment at a thai restaurant downtown with a recent Middlebury grad. We were eventually an hour late, had a good dinner (at least I did, others seemed to agree that Middlebury’s Sabai Sabai is better), went out for froyo and a walk, and headed back to get our things in preparation for the 1am bus to Washington, D.C..
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