The City that Doesn't Sleep
Though *I* sleep... still and all, had a great time seeing friends that I don't get to see often enough.... The trip down, however, egads. I checked into how much the train would be and Holy Christ on a Cracker, everyone at Amtrak is smoking crack. It was $75 more expensive to take the train than to fly, and from Richmond, the only schedules would have allowed me to stay in New York for a total of six hours, all in the middle of the night. Although the flights were cheaper than the train, there is the expensive trip into the city (if you go from Newark), or the incredibly time consuming trip in (if you go from JFK or LaGuardia).... which left me with the Chinatown bus.
Now. I took the Chinatown bus many times from D.C., and it really wasn't bad, and was dirt cheap. This, however, was the trip from hell. The Chinatown bus has been discovered. By everybody. And they are all on the bus. Behaving badly. First of all, it left Richmond at 1am. When I arrived at the departure location-- which was not the address that was listed on the ticket, mind you-- mister bus man said "you're late." I arrived at 12:45am. How this is late for a 1am departure is beyond me. All I wanted to do was sleep so that I could be functional when I arrived. However, on the way up I was in front of a triad of obnoxious teenaged skateboarders who wouldn't shut the hell up. When I got to the city it seemed as though there was some sort of skateboarding convention happening-- there were skaters everywhere all weekend. These young men appeared to be on their way to this event. They were young and suburban and very very white, and it was cringeworthy to listen to them singing/rapping along with their ipods, spouting the first person narratives on the difficulties of being a black man in the world. They also had an ongoing conversation (and by ongoing I mean that it started when they got on the bus in Baltimore and continued until we arrived in New York) that went something like this:
Dumbass #1: D00D, I'm so tired.
Dumbass #2: D00D, this is the warmest soda I've ever had.
Dumbass #3: D00D, where'd you get that?
Dumbass #2: D00D, it was in your closet.
Dumbass #3: D00D, that's gross.
Dumbass #1: D00D, I'm so tired.
Dumbass #2: D00D, where are we?
(Note: we were in Delaware when this first came up. It came up a thousand times. And every answer they gave each other was wrong. I know this because I've spent faaaaar too much time going between D.C. and New York, and some serious quality time on the NJ Turnpike).
Dumbass #3: D00D, we're like, in New Jersey or something.
Dumbass #1: D00D, I'm so tired.
I was so tired, too. I suspect we all would have been less tired if they'd just shut the hell up and gone to sleep.
When I got to Chinatown I tried to get in touch with Julee, but just got her voicemail. So I walked around Chinatown for a long time, taking pictures.
I had a lot of cameras with me. They were heavy.
I checked out the stuff in the windows. I miss Chinatown. I miss being in places where one is connected to the things that you eat. I don't eat pig. This is one of the reasons why. Because if you aren't willing to deal with the fact that bacon comes from an animal that was once walking around with this on its shoulders, you shouldn't be eating it.
I brought the Olympus Pen half frame camera. I haven't been using it enough lately. But... I don't know. I guess it feels like the diptychs work best when you're in an urban environment.
I kept calling Julee, but I kept getting her voicemail. I kept walking around. And calling. And walking around. I went to Pearl Paint and wandered around. (I miss Pearl Paint). I walked over to West Broadway. I walked uptown. I got to Houston and cut over to 6th. Sat in a little park and read for a while. Walked further uptown. Eventually, I got to midtown by where Claude's sister lives. Turns out that Julee and Claude were coming into town from Long Island, were on the train, and she'd forgotten her phone. But she didn't realize it until there were at Grand Central.
Sadly, with the close of the visit came the return trip on the Chinatown bus. I arrived half and hour early, got the second to last seat on the bus. The bus left 25 minutes early. I have no idea what I would have done had I missed the early departing bus... it was the last one of the day. In any case, I was stuck sitting next to a Chinese woman who was traveling with her two children, who were about nine and twelve, who sat in the seats in front of us. She loudly smacked away at the preserved plums she'd brought and hovered over her kids. She did not shut up. Not once. The entire, nine hour trip. She talked on the phone. A lot. And when not yelling a Chinese dialect I didn't recognize (something southern.. I heard things that sounded kind of like Hainamese, but wasn't. Not Cantonese, though.) into the phone, she was talking to her kids. She was clearly asking questions or giving them instructions. They rolled their eyes and tried to ignore her. She provoked such anxiety in me.... I can't imagine what it must be like to be one of those kids.
Meanwhile, the guy in the seat behind me listened to music coming out of his phone. No headphones, just loud, tinny, non-stop hip hop from the seat behind. I wanted to strangle him. Best part? Only two people on the entire bus weren't going to Richmond, so the bus remained packed the whole way. SIGH.
That will probably be the last Chinatown bus experience.... at least for a very long time.
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