Productive, Yet Slack Weekend

I had a pretty busy weekend and yet I did no work.

On Friday I took an exam. I think I've mentioned this in the previous entry so enough about that. Oh -- what's worth mentioning is that after the conference in Queens 5 of us went down to K-town (Korea-town) for Jja jang mien -- excellent brown sauce noodles with lots of seafood. Yum. (I know the description doesn't sound yum but trust me, it was.)

On Saturday I woke up late (like around 10am) and then went to Fairway to grab groceries. I'm getting the hang of walking 20 mins to the supermarket and then spending 1 or so hour in the supermarket trying to find the most economically priced beef, chicken thighs, milk, orange juice, sausages, ham etc. I really miss the feeling of walking into Sainsbury's and heading straight for the milk section and then buying the orange juice that comes at £2 for 8 1-litre cartons. Everything was just so simple and straightforward. And of course, the walk to Sainsbury's was barely 5 mins, not a 20 min brisk walk. But Fairway is quite cool. Actually, it's quite cold. There's a "Cold Room" where they store all their meats and juices and milk and so on -- things that would normally be in the chilled section of any supermarket. They even provide jackets for customers to wear before we enter the cold room. And things are not that cheap here. But they're cheaper than elsewhere I've found around the area. So now going to Fairway has become a fortnightly event for me -- usually on a Saturday morning.

Then later that day I went down to Times Square to grab student rush tickets for the musical "Hairspray". Here the rush tickets are sold on a lottery basis. It doesn't matter whether you were first in line for the rush tickets or last. Cos between 5pm - 5.30pm you can enter your name in the lottery (each name qualifies for a max of 2 tickets) and at 5.30pm they pick 12 names for the 24 tickets that they sell for $25 each. I thought this was quite an interesting concept. I was quite annoyed at the big families who put in so many entries cos each person is entitled to one entry. And of course their chances of getting tickets at all is higher. I put in one entry for me and Shuxiang cos he was not there. But I did get picked and I think all in all only a handful of people were turned away.

The musical was quite good. It was one of those high-energy dance-dance-revolution kind of musicals with great energetic singing and dancing and loud costumes and slapstick comedy. Of course there was an underlying theme of racial segregation and stuff, but even that was given a very superficial treatment. I mean any one would watched it would enjoy him- or herself. But I think musicals come and go like fads. Gone are the extremely tragic musicals with poignant ballads, like Phantom or Les Miz or Miss Saigon. Cos now's the era of funny energetic musicals with lots of dancing and singing -- like Hairspray, Fame, Lion King and others I can't rattle off the top of my head. I miss those old classic favourites. Each soaring note belted out by the singer made my hair stand on end and my heart beat faster with the passion that emanated from the stage. After a while people will get tired of the psychedelic gimmicks. But I don't think I'll ever tire of listening to heartwrenching sob-tales of sacrifice and love. At least I think those storylines were more meaningful than the ones currently played out on stage in Broadway.

On Sunday after church I went down to Washington Square Park at the Village to take a look at what I thought would be the New York Book Fair. It turned out to be some Jewish festival celebrating the advent of Rosh Hashanah. Still I managed to get two books I've been wanting to read for a long time from a second-hand book stall I found just outside the park: "The Lovely Bones" and "The Hours".

Then at night Nat and I went to check out this comedic open-mic that was free of charge. We stumbled upon a fantastic burger joint called "Paul's Palace" and we had excellent burgers there. We found a place that made good root beer floats at long last. They very cleverly placed the scoop of vanilla ice cream on one side of the rim of the glass so the ice cream didn't just effervesce in the root beer and disappear -- you could put as much of the ice cream into the rootbeer as you wanted. Mmmm... After that we had pomme frites (ie French fries -- quite literally) at this Belgian shack that was run by 2 Chinese guys (ah cosmopolitan New York). One of the guys let us try his special sauce -- it was made of smoked eggplant with sambal, if I'm not wrong, with a bit of mayo? Not sure. It tasted a bit funny but then Nat seemed to like it. We settled on sweet mango chutney sauce in the end. Yes I hear your incredulity. Sweet mango chutney sauce with french fries? Sounds very wrong? But it tasted all right. In fact, we made the choice out of some 20 different sauces that these 2 blokes had conjured up. You could taste a sample of the sauce before settling on one. And the fries were simply excellent -- hot and crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. Plus there was a mixture of fat and thin fries (I like fat ones and Nat likes thin ones) so we were both well pleased by the fries.

So I'm sure you can just picture us -- guzzling root beer float, almost imbibing the greasy burgers, and then savouring pomme frites with sweet mango chutney sauce while laughing at the amateur comedians telling us joke after joke for one full hour. I didn't expect to enjoy it so much, but I did, despite the cusswords. Apparently nothing in New York is funny unless punctuated with the f-word.

So yeah -- I felt I had spent a thoroughly New York-er weekend and dude -- it was awesome.