2nd Semester Moving In!

So yeah. Moving in. It went pretty smoothly by my standards. Room is nice, roommate is definitely better than last year's, and plenty of space. Just a couple pics from the room for you guys.
This is all before we moved things around.

This is us pretty much fully moved in. Much better.
So far this semester nothing that exciting has happened. It's funny how quickly college has become mundane. I'm already excited for the semester to be over and I'm only an 8th done with it. Although I did attend my first Wildcats football game, which was pretty fun. We ended up winning 70-0 though, so it wasn't really an interesting game to watch, just fun to watch our team destroy the opposition. It actually was postponed for an hour due to lightning, during which we stood in the rain. Good times.

New York: Day 6

The sixth, and essentially last day, was by far the best. We started out by heading over to the Met for some early morning art appreciation. The architecture alone there was amazing, let alone the artwork inside. We spent a few hours there and explored a good bit of the museum. The paintings were phenomenal, I was actually amazed at how many really well known paintings they had.Also super cool is this group of fully armored knights in action. Sure it was heavy as hell, but that armor is friggin' sweet. Even the horses are decked out. Must have been Middle Ages bling.
So after the Met we wandered over to Central Park. The size of the park is intense. It's big enough that you really don't feel like you're in the middle of a massive city, which is saying something. We walked all around, but I couldn't pass up a picture with the Mad Hatter. Pretty sweet. He doesn't really look all that kid friendly though.
And last was the absolute climax of the trip. We went to TKTS and stood in line for just shy of an hour to get discount tickets to Spamalot. Spamalot was actually our backup plan because Wicked was sold out. It ended up being an awesome backup plan as it was one of the funniest and most solid productions I've seen. It's even better than The Holy Grail. How many times do you hear about a spoof being better than the original?
All that's left was to wake up the next day and jump on the plane. Thus ends my trip to New York City!

New York: Day 5

So day 5 was pretty relaxed. We went to Rockefeller Plaza again and walked around that area for a while. I actually missed the Atlas statue the first time, so I was glad I had a chance to see it.

After that, we went back and hung out at the apartment while Dom had a business meeting to go to. We pretty much just chilled and then went to dinner at the Corner Bistro. It's a small bar kind of place that only has 4 or 5 things on the menu. They're famous for their burgers, so obviously that's what I had. Good stuff indeed. They also had an ancient bar and ancient cash register which were pretty neat.The last thing, I don't even remember when I saw this, but it amused me. This is a call box down on the subway platform.
So yeah... that was day 5. Not really much, but we made up for it on the last day.

New York: Day 4

Day 4 was a lot of shopping and walking around some of the shopping districts and re-doing some of the places I had already been for Danielle. However, it was the first time I had gone in to any of the stores so it was cool to see the insides of some of the stores. During my New York trip, I made a lot of comparisons to my Japan trip, as Tokyo is the closest approximation to New York that I have. It was nice to see this, a merger of the two worlds.We had actually gone to a Uniqlo in Japan, so it was fun to see it here in New York. The clothes in the New York store were fairly similar, but there were more designer type clothes and edgier stuff than I remember there being in Japan. Either way, it was a fun place to go. Also ever-present during the trip were these mobile film studios. I think I saw 4 of them in 7 days, so they're very prevalent.
So these are just the dressing room trailers. There's a whole convoy that comes and sets up in the streets. Generally three or four trailers and then a couple vans for catering and whatnot. Y'know, cause streets in New York aren't crowded enough already or anything. It's funny though because obviously I found this really cool, but all the other people walking down the sidewalks didn't even think twice about them. It's amazing how differently tourists and residents of New York must see things. Like the Statue of Liberty, for instance.
We made a special trip to take the Staten Island Ferry, and yet some people take it every day as part of their commute. So some people literally see the statue almost every day of the week. It would be tragic to me to lose the beauty of this statue to the rigors of the daily grind.
Just another cool skyline from the ferry. Afterward, we had dinner at Otto, one of Mario Batali's restaurants. It had a really cool reservation system where you were given a city name, and when your table was ready, it showed up on an old-school train time board. And that was day 4!

New York: Day 3

Alright, so at first my reason for not blogging was a really impressive sunburn on my legs. After that, it's been because we've been watching the olympics every night. So, sorry about that.

Alright, so Saturday was all about Fire Island. It's a tiny strip of land off the coast of Long Island. It's about 2 hours worth of travel from Manhattan but you can't even tell you're a part of New York any more.
So Fire Island actually has different little villages, and Dom's house was in South Beach just off the bay side of the island. You have to take a ferry from Long Island to Fire Island, about 30 minutes give or take 5 depending on conditions, and then you pull into a small Marina.This is the marina, looking out across the bay towards Long Island. There isn't really much beach on this side of the island, the focus is on the ocean side.
And here it is, the Atlantic ocean. The beaches were beautiful and not very crowded. Unfortunately there was some kind of jellyfish orgy at some point and the water was filled with jellyfish babies. I ended up only wading in about knee-high into the water because of this. The jellyfish were harmless, but unpleasant. So we got to fire island around noon, and stayed on the beach for 3 or 4 hours (which is how I managed to burn my legs) and then walked around the market part of the community.There were markets, bars, restaurants, bakeries, just about everything you could ever need. It was really a nice lifestyle on the island. After walking around the town, we just crashed at the beach house and some of my brother's friends put on an awesome barbecue later on. After dinner, we caught the ferry back and headed back into Manhattan. Thus ending day 3!

New York: Day 2

So today was really low-key. Me and Dom just walked around a little more, but more just for a feeling of the city. We went to the West Side Highway, which runs along the Hudson river.
So this is looking across the Hudson at New Jersey. These are actually the only two photos I took today, I kinda slacked off. After this we just walked around what's called the Meat Packing district to check out all the popular restaurants and designer stores. After that, we grabbed lunch at John's Pizza which is Dom's favorite pizza place here. Super thin crust, coal fired, and delicious! Dom accidentally ordered pepperoni and mushroom so I rolled with it. I actually couldn't taste or tell that the mushrooms were there, so it worked out nicely. Then, we went back to the apartment and we both passed out for 3 hours. Not quite sure why. Anyhoo, then we went to Dom's friend's apartment to pick up an air mattress, walked around a little bit more, and then headed to the airport. After picking up my sister, we came back to the apartment and that's the whole day. Tomorrow: Fire Island!

New York: Day 1

First of all, greetings from the future for those of you back west. First day here in New York and it's already off to a good start. We walked around the neighborhood, checked out the local restaurants and shops and then grabbed lunch at the White Horse Tavern. This place has been around since 1880, almost 130 years. Just thinking of the crazy amount of history this one place alone has is mind blowing. The crazy part is, New York is full of these places. There's an unfathomable amount of history around you at all times. We then proceeded to Times Square for a little bit, where I found two of my Meccas. First was the Toys R Us with the ferris wheel. Nice, big store. And sure enough, they had an RZone. It was funny how similar some things were to the store where I worked in Scottsdale. Lots of games and fun stuff. One crazy thing though was the stack of Wii's just sitting on the ground, unguarded.Weird.I thought this place was awesome, but then we found the next stop.

NINTENDO WORLD!

Yes, a whole store of nothing but Nintendo products. Shirts, wallets, figures, games, food. Everything Nintendo. I could write a whole post on the Nintendo store alone. They had an some stuff on display, limited edition units, and older stuff never released in America. They also had a famous original GameBoy.

It survived an explosion in the Gulf War. The exterior is completely toasted, but it still works perfectly. They actually have Tetris running on it. This is why I never worry about extended warranties on Nintendo Products. After Bush destroys the world, it'll be nothing but roaches playing Wii.
After all this, we headed back to the apartment for a little while. We then headed out to dinner for my brother's friend's birthday, so I got to meet some of his friends which was fun. We then walked back through SoHo and got caught in a sudden rainstorm. And now I'm writing this post. And since it's done, I'm going to bed. Goodnight from here in Manhattan!