New York: Day 4

What with two days of walking and staying up all night Friday, I only woke up at one in the afternoon, fairly disgusted with myself for having wasted a whole morning in New York. In hindsight though, the relatively relaxed day rested me enough for another assault on the city starting Sunday.

Saturday afternoon my friend and I took the subway down to Soho, with a view to people-watch and take in the World Trade Center site in the process. Our leisurely stroll took us down Broadway through Soho (after South of Houston, a street in Lower Manhattan) and Tribeca (after Triangle below Canal Street), passing the western edge of Chinatown along Broadway.

These areas reminded me very strongly of Brigade Road in Bangalore or the Chowringhee area in Calcutta. Teeming masses of people everywhere, roadside stalls selling drinks, hot pretzels and hot dogs (I couldn’t leave New York without buying a hot dog from a hot dog stand!), and people hawking wares on the sidewalk. Everything is available here, from pirated copies of the latest movies to $5 ties that look so good that I couldn’t resist buying one.

The walk brought us to the corner of Fulton and Church, the site where the World Trade Center stood until recently. While not as poignant a scene as you would think, Ground Zero did give us brief pause for thought. Here, while re-energizing ourselves with cheesecake and hot chocolate, we got a frantic call from Kai, one of Luvshack’s colleagues at AIESEC at whose place we were supposed to be having an international potluck dinner that evening. Forgetting that Americans tend to eat earlier than we are used to, we had assumed that the dinner had been scheduled for 9 pm, but the call reminded us that we had only forty-five minutes to get to Kai’s place. Not being able to cook anything in such a short time, we stopped off at a hole-in-the-wall Bangladeshi restaurant in downtown Manhattan for four orders of chicken curry, vegetables and rice on our way to Queens.

The potluck was fun – AIESEC, being an international student organization, has a very interesting group of people. There was Simonetta and her boyfriend from Germany, Kai from China and her boyfriend Juan from Colombia, Oussama from Tunisia and his roommate Yacina from Morocco, Rickesh from India, and Suzanne from the US. The food was great: another session of brik courtesy Suzanne, Simonetta's "German fruit" (thanks a ton for that btw!) and Kai's delicious beef and chicken dishes. Oussama and Juan contributed as well, but unfortunately by that point I was too full to taste what they had brought or remember their names. However, it was, by all other accounts, superb.

We were supposed to go to a Greek club called Cavo at 31st Avenue and 42nd Street in Queens after the potluck, but being in sneakers, I was denied entry, which actually suited a few others and me just fine. So, while most of the people went in, Rickesh, Luvshack, Oussama, Yacina and I hopped on the subway back to Manhattan.

I followed the India-Pakistan score for a little while but soon the quantities of exotic red wine I had consumed got the better of me and I drifted off into a deep dreamless sleep.