The following takes place between 2:30 a.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, between Washington, D.C. and New York City.
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Last weekend four of us in the Washington, D.C. semester program thought a quick little run up to New York City would be fun. What better way to get there than the Chinatown bus? Cheap, easy, sketchy and environmentally unfriendly.
Riding the D.C. Metro on the last train to run for the night, was, uhhh, an experience. All the club rats and 16-year-olds with fake IDs were riding at that time, and the whole car wreaked of cheap vodka and way too much cologne (try showering if you want to smell good).
Chinatown in D.C. should really be considered a shopping-mall-Disney-theme-park version of a real Chinatown; there is a Hooters and a Fuddruckers in the heart of it!
A few hours on the bus, and like passengers on a red-eye flight to Los Angeles, we stumbled off the bus in New York's Chinatown.
The first thing my nose wanted to do was die. Then it wanted to detach itself from my face and kill me. Let's just say New York's Chinatown is, uhh ... pungent. My olfactory was hit with the fun smell of squid, rotten fruit, old vegetables and dead fish. It was a smorgasbord of smells, none of which was even remotely pleasant.
The second thing I noticed about New York is that size really does matter. All right, D.C. does have the Washington Monument ('atta boy George!) but everything in New York is just bigger than anything I could have ever imagined.
You walk down these streets and look up at towering steel and glass and stone. D.C. has some sort of zoning thing going on, but basically you can see the Capitol Dome from almost anywhere in the city. In New York, I could barely see the Empire State building from only a few blocks away.
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One of our many stops was Greenwich Village, on the west side of downtown. The Dupont Circle of New York, only larger, more fun and more hip, the Village just made me want to clutch my double latte macchiato and read GQ. Which I actually did for a bit, only I decided Details and an iced coffee ("Splenda," please) would suit me better.
From the Village we moved on to Koreatown and eventually made our way to Times Square. Aside from being bombarded with visual overload, I found the rest of the city to be like Chinatown; the smells can be at times delicious (like when walking past the 349,894 million nut vendors on street corners) and at times outright nauseating (like when you descend underground into the subway and get hit with spurts of urine).
Times Square is like the whole city of New York, only on steroids. It has everything the rest of the city has, only in one compact jumbo nugget with lights and ads and LCD screens. Every corporation that even remotely matters in our capitalist system is represented, each pumping the unsuspecting tourist chock full of consumer messages: "Buy this." "You must look like this." "You know you want to watch this."
As the four of us wandered up and down the streets of Times Square, like ants in a giant ant farm, with the Almighty laughing down at how lost and silly we looked, we were pummeled by people trying to sell us Beepets to all sorts of shows.
"VIP seats! Tonight only! For you, only $5." Yeah right. Of course, we couldn't resist a $5 comedy show with "Comedy Central Comedians," so like good tourists, we handed over the cash and went to the show.
The comedians had their moments, but overall there are only so many times they could tell the same racially charged joke before I started to get offended. There is a never-ending amount of political jokes to be made, and yet for some reason the comedians are still telling the same lame "stained blue dress" joke. If the past six years hasn't provided you with enough content to do a comedy routine, then please, give me my five bucks back and get off the stage.
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On Sunday, we ate lunch at probably the most famous Jewish Deli in the city, Katz's Deli in the Lower East Side. I mean, anywhere that has a sign hanging from the ceiling that says, "This is where Harry met Sally" has to be top notch.
A bowl of Matzah ball soup and a half corned beef sandwich later, I was ready to take out a loan to pay the bill. But it was worth it; I mean I could have met my very own Sally there, right? "Shalom Sally, I've got no more money!"
At Central Park, we passed a small contingent of Anti-Killing-Seals-In-The-Arctic protesters. Four women had a sign they were holding to cover their naked bodies with as they screamed something about saving the innocent. I couldn't concentrate that well with their nudity so readily present; the 40-degree weather wasn't helping my concentration, ahem.
"Do you like animals?" one older protester asked me, much to my surprise. "Yeah, in my belly," I responded. Too bad she never heard me, because I would have liked to see her facial reaction.
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For dinner, we decided to check out Little Italy. In a place where size matters (and as an Italian-American) I'm offended it is called Little Italy. Then I got there and realized that this wasn't some sort of sick and twisted joke, but Little Italy is literally one block. That's it. Maybe they should call it Italytown or something. Why don't we call it Little Korea or Little China? I say it isn't fair.
Still, the best place to shop on a college budget (and after getting soaked at Katz's) is Little China (I refuse to call it Chinatown from now on). Fucci, Dolce and Fabbana, Foach, you name it, they've got it. They'll take you down some sketchy alleyway, up three flights of stairs or into a basement back room, to show you the stuff that "fell off the truck."
Not that we experienced any of this, per se, first hand. But we saw, um, other people getting shuffled into a cellar.
After a nice 42 hours in the city, it was time to return to the solitude of D.C. Like Jack Bauer, we didn't stop to use a bathroom the whole trip, we never changed our clothing, and we took down bad guys (thanks for the help Spiderman!) through illegal methods.
As for the city that never sleeps, it is good to be back in one that does.
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Jamie Bologna is a junior majoring in political science. You can e-mail him at James.Bologna@tufts.edu.
