Random day trip to New York City

So this last week two of Bryan's siblings, Lindsey and Michael (totally awesome people by the way), were visiting and they decided to go to NYC on Sunday. Lindsey had invited me to go and at 11:30 I decided to tag along with them. So at 6 AM Bryan, Michael, Lindsey, and I left Crystal City and headed over to China to take the Chinatown bus to New York. The bus left at 6:45 and I won't lie, it was pretty uncomfortable. Not life alteringly terrible like I had heard, but not that great. I got about 3 1/2 hours of sleep the night before so I slept almost the whole way. I did wake up towards the end there as we drove into the city. While we were still a long way off I could see the skyline and one of the skyscrapers was relfecting the sun really brightly and it reminded me of that quote from Annie when Miss Hannigan tells them to "clean this dump till it shines like the top of the Chrysler Building!" My mom used to always say that so it reminded me of her.

Once we got in to NY it made me laugh because Michael and Bryan both were immediately blown away at how many people were there and how huge it was. First thing we did was cross the street to McDonalds to use the bathroom. None of us dared to use the one on the bus. We then headed over to the subway to get a map and figure out what we were doing. They didn't have any maps left at that stop so we just used the one on the wall. We ended up going to the natural history museum, Strawberry Fields/Imagine memorial, the Statue of Liberty (we didn't ferry over), Chinatown, and Times Square that night. All day I could never find a map. That town is now worthless in my mind because I couldn't find a map. I could have done such an amazing job navigating if only I had a map... But that's ok cause it was still fun. At the Imagine memorial there were a few guys singing Beatle's songs and it was just fun to walk and chill around the city for a day. Lindsey is the hot one on the left, I'm upside down, Michael is the one in the hat, and Bryan has the funky smile.

All in all it was a super fun day. Lots of food, lots of spending money, and lots of walking. The ride home was a little less awesome. The ticket said the bus would leave at 10:30 so we got there a bit after 10 to make sure we got good seats only to find that the bus wasn't going to leave till 11. After everyone was loaded we looked around and it wasn't full so all 4 of us got our own 2 seats. Then a few stragglers hopped on and even though I was sitting in the isle one of the guys asked me if the seat next to me was taken. I scooted over and he sat down next to me. Of all the seats that were there, he picked the one next to me. BOO! We drove an hour to Newark and changed buses there for some reason. That was lame cause I was totally asleep. On the way back I sat in the isle next to Bryan. Aisle = bad, but aisle = bad so it evened out. We stopped again in Baltimore and people got off so I took my own row for the last hour of the drive. We got back to Chinatown a bit after 3 and grabbed a cab (yes, cabs were running at 3 AM) back to the apartment since the metro wasn't running. I was in bed by 3:30 and up at 7:15 to get ready for work. It was pretty intense. The next night I started watching Letters from Iwo Jima but around 10:30 I realized that I got about 4 hours of sleep and decided to go to bed. I was very happy I did. I was asleep by 11 - that hasn't happened for a while.