The Big Apple

I played hooky yesterday and joined my husband on his business trip to NYC yesterday. I had always intended to join him on a day when he only had a short meeting in the morning, and yesterday was that day.

We left Albany (well, Rennsselaer) at about 8 a.m. and arrived in New York (Penn Station) at 10:30 a.m. While Chris and his boss went to their meeting, I walked down a few blocks to Union Square, where I spent a few hours just mostly sitting, enjoying the gorgeous day, and watching the dogs in the dog park. Though there were quite a few people around (doesn't anybody WORK???) it was very peaceful and I actually just enjoyed sitting there, watching the people and the dogs. I'm not usually such a "sit and do ABSOLUTELY nothing" kind of person... but it was good.

After that, I met up with Chris and we took in a few hot dogs, as well as some mango and papaya juice, at Grey's Papaya (the #1 special with sweet onion sauce... yummy!). From there, we decided to hoof it down to the World Trade Center site, as neither of us had been since 9/11. On our way downtown, we walked along the Hudson River Park

Looking downtown at the skyline, sans Twin Towers

Some pictures of the activity going on at the World Trade Center:

By this time, we were both overheated and our feet were killing us. There's only so much draw a beautiful day can have, so we headed underground to take the subway back uptown to Times Square.

Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square

Once there in Times Square, we decided it was time to sit in someplace cool and have someone provide us with beverages. So, since Chris had never been, we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for an early dinner/late lunch/afternoon snack of salads and diet Pepsi. I enjoy the Hard Rock Cafe experience with all of the fun memorabilia on the walls and loud rock music playing, and it was wonderful to sit down out of the sun and heat and drink like a fish. (We made sure to use the bathroom before we left).

After our respite, we headed for the TKTS booth in order to find some tickets to a show. Which we did. But before heading to the show, Chris wanted to spend some time in Central Park. So again we headed for the subway. There were quite a few people out, and we stretched out on the big rock and basically just hung out for probably an hour or so, shooting the shit and taking random pictures of women singing with full face veils on and a bum who seemed infatuated with or fascinated by the pieces of wire holding the lengths of fence to the posts surrounding the lanscaping work in the park. In a nutshell, boring in a good way.

Then it was time to head BACK downtown to Greenwich Village, where we found our theater destination, then set out to find another snack (really, we just didn't have it in us to walk anymore so we had to SIT somewhere). So we had a dinner/snack at the Peculier Pub on Bleecker St. We just had sandwiches, and we did not have beer though the bottled list looked pretty extensive (alphabetical by country!).

A crappy yet still visible picture of a clown mosaic made of beer bottle caps at the Peculier Pub(yes, that's PeculiEr, not PeculiAr)

After that pit stop, it was time to head just down the street for our show at the Village Theatre to see "I Love You Because..."

I won't go into all sorts of details and what have you about the show, other than to say that it was an acting cast of 6 people that must have an incredible amount of energy. It was entertaining, funny, and I really enjoyed it. I don't have a lot of experience with musicals (on Broadway, off-Broadway, or otherwise) but it kept me entertained and the 2 hours flew by and that's all that matters to me.

UNFORTUNATLY, fly is what we had to do after the show ended. We had really cut it close by taking in a show with an 8pm start time "all the way down" in the Village. The show ended at about 10:15 and our Amtrak train left at 10:45. We made it, fortunately, because that was the last train of the night. We would have been stuck in the city for the night, which would have been expensive (compounded by the fact that I would have probably missed work today too...)!!

I wanted to sleep on the train, since we wouldn't get home until 1:30 a.m. However, people are morons. And morons have technology. And morons with technology tend to have the LOUDEST technology, because he/she is too much of a moron to realize that other people don't need evidence of every single flippin' time one presses a flippin' button on one's F@*$&N' phone. Not to mention Moron Supreme, who sets a flippin' alarm on the flippin' phone, then proceeds to fall soundly asleep so that the rest of us are subjected to hearing that alarm for an entire HOUR before my darling husband decided to go (literally!) shake the guy out of his slumber and tell him to turn it off!

And that was our day. We got home and crashed, and I had to get up at 6:30 for work. YAY! Now I'm tired, and I think I need a nap. And my calves hurt. I won't even MENTION my completely ripped up (formerly BLEEDING) feet b/c of my F@#$IN' shoes. Damnit.