The Country Mice Visit the Big City

Fact: I have been living in Jersey for almost a year and up until last Saturday night, I had yet to get into the City (The City being New York City, not Newark. No one in their right mind would go to Newark for fun, unless you’re going to a Devil’s game and even then you need to travel by tank and have a RPG handy.) The last time I was in the Big Apple, was last March when I had to wander around the Met searching for Images of Renaissance women; did I mention that I also had suffered a bout of food poisoning the night before? Fun times.

It was looking like it was going to be a quiet weekend at home. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Chris and I had just come off of a weekend of carousing at a Bucknellian wedding and we were still pretty tired. (A blog post to come later, when I move my photos from my camera to the computer.) Anyway, I was thinking I had a weekend of laundry and grocery shopping to look forward to, when I got a call from my friend Rachel, who wanted to know if Chris and I wanted to come into the city for dinner and a show. I was ecstatic, (I hadn’t seen Rachel since the last Bucknell wedding), Chris was less so. He was up on seeing Rachel, but iffy on actually going into the city.

You see, as we have come to find out, doing fun and exciting things in New York is a lot harder when you don’t actually live in New York. Do you take the train? The Dover station is 10 minutes and the boys have taken the train into the city on multiple occasions but it’s expensive and you are very much dependent on the train schedule, which could cut short your trip if the train stops running at a certain time of night. Then do you drive? It takes us about an hour door to door, more if there’s traffic. But then you have to decide which President will make your trip easier- do you take the Tunnel (Lincoln) or the Bridge (Washington)? Then there is parking. Do you risk on street or pay through the nose in a garage?

We drove.

We actually lucked out on that aspect. After locating Rachel’s apartment (one block from the UN), we ran into a parking garage a block down with a weekend special.
After that, the rest of the night locked into place.

We had a great dinner catching up at a little Mexican restaurant (Quesadillas! Guacamole!), walked up and down 2nd Avenue where most of the restaurants had opened their large windows to the street or set up tables on the sidewalk, and grabbed a drink at a quiet bar in Union square where we watched party goers, skate boarders and a guy in a full Viking costume stream by.

We ended the night by taking in a show, Stuffed and Unstrung, an adult puppet show brought to you by the letter H, as in Brian Henson, as in Jim Henson’s son. Think Whose Line is it Anyway mixed with The Muppet show and add some alcohol to taste. The result: pure genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a99I7Vsh6dI
I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.