New York City Part 1

Happy New Year everybody!

Oh boy I have lots to tell you. Tomorrow I go back to college for my second semester of my last year. Yay for being a second semester senior so soon! It's going to be great :)

So anyway, last week I went to New York City to celebrate the New Year with some school friends and my family. It was a blast. We left my house on Wednesday morning, with the intention of driving all the way to Edison, NJ, to where we had booked two hotel rooms. It was a tight car ride; I squeezed in between Soreen and Staci in the back. Kevin drove and Katherine sat up front and operated the musical selections. My parents came separately in the van with Vishnu. All was well until we crossed the New York border line and Kevin's GPS somehow managed to steer us off the highway and into a lengthy detour in the Bronx, down many streets with sketchy store names like "Horizon Wireless". Note: you should look at the pictures from my facebook album entitled: New Years at New York City.


We got back onto the highway a while later and managed to reach Edison by late afternoon. While Kevin, Soreen, Staci, and Katherine all went to watch Avatar in a movie theater, I hung with my family that night and went to visit Madhavi and Shyam's new apartment in Jersey. We even had a lovely sit-on-the-floor dinner.


We drove back to the hotel and fought to stay away until past 12 in order to get practice for tomorrow. I know what you're thinking: staying up? That must be a cinch for you! Actually it was kind of hard since my sleep schedule was running normally again. :P

The next morning, we took the NJ transit into New York City (Penn Station) but then took the subway to Flushing, where we were meeting Soreen's friends from college. We had dimsum at this cool place and hung out at some Asian stores before heading back into the city. I learned that I had been holding chopsticks the wrong way forever.

Finally! When we emerged from the subway station, it was 5 PM and we were amidst the flashy signs and bright lights that were Times Square! It was exciting...up until we realized that police had already started barricading people into pens to watch the ball drop. We frantically looked around for an entrance into one of the pens before they closed it up. Eventually, we ran 10 blocks from 42nd to 52nd street to enter one of the open pens. There was already a huge mass of people crowded around the entrance. After being pressed and mashed and squashed for 20 minutes, we eventually trickled out of the crowd, having crossed the first of many such barriers.

Here my friends look triumphant after crossing the first barrier and freely walking down the road. However, there were a couple more to come. The longest wait was before the final barrier, after which we entered Times Square itself. THAT was a good feeling. It was a chilly night, but when we were in the crowd, it didn't feel cold.

It's hard to tell in the above picture, but the ball is sitting right on top of that tower in the distance with the flashy signs (that building is One Times Square, the one you see on TV all the time). We ended up moving as far as the Sbarro's Pizza, but then that was it since there were so many people there. At abut 7 PM, we decided to leave Times Square and maybe visit Central Park for fireworks. I saw Madhan on the subway!! How cool is that?

Eventually, it started snowing and hailing, so we decided to head back to the hotel room and maybe catch the ball drop on television. Instead, we got delayed in Penn Station and ended up celebrating New Years at the top of a parking deck! It was actually loads of fun. When I make the video, you can see it. And THEN, we were incredibly pooped and our hands were really cold after flinging ice at each other for a while so we drove back to the hotel and slept. What an end to the decade!

To be continued in Part 2.