Selected highlights from my NY trip

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Kinda the real reason why I went to New York (besides finally visiting the MoMA). Though in hindsight, I really shouldn't travel to New York on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving since I-95 is literally the highway to hell that day, stretching a 4-hour trip to over 6-hours. Anyway, after I dropped everything off at the hostel, I headed to the Museum of Natural History. That's the site where the balloons were filled up. It's quite the sight with all the over-sized balloons weighted down along two streets. Even the most jaded New Yorker and their over-privileged children were enjoying this. Also funny was when a very upset little girl asking if Dora the Explorer was dead on account of it lying face down and her mom trying to calm her down and telling her that it's just a freakin' balloon.

The next day, a guy from the hostel and I checked out the parade. He has a name, like Liek or something, but I forgot, since I've been secretly calling him faux!Smiz in my head.
As you can see from the picture, he doesn't look too much like our Smiz. But he has the exact same mannerisms as Smiz and the sideburns and he kinda dressed like Smiz, too. Faux!Smiz is also doing his MBA in Maryland (though he's an industrial engineer on top of that, so that's a bit different than our Smiz). Also, he's from Germany and with the real!Smiz dating Catrin, who's also from Germany, the tenuous six-degrees sorta works. In my head.

Anyway, German!Smiz and I went to grab a prime-viewing spot an hour ahead of the parade because we heard how horribly crowded it gets. Of course, we didn't factor in the shitty weather and we ended up standing in the rain for an hour in addition to the two hours of parade. We did grab a pretty good spot though behind a family, who had been to the parade for 14 years. The parents were pretty excited. The dad even knew which balloons debut in which year off the top of his head. The 5 kids in tow though, were understandably less enthused. In fact, pretty whinny and bitchy even when the parents got them hot chocolate and warm egg sandwiches. (Oh how I'd like the snatch that hot chocolate from their ungrateful little hands!)

That's the Dad in that picture. He made boderline icky comments like "Twhirl that baton, kids!"

I still couldn't figure out if the parade was worth the 3 hours of rain and the 6-hour bus trip. The balloons were pretty rad. Though they flew them pretty low because of the wind and because some accident ten years ago. Some of the floats were pretty intricate and cool. But there were also a lot of marching bands accompanied by cheerleaders in sequined leotards. A lot of sequined leotards. But it was entertaining to differentiate the real cheerleader, who'd smile and wave their pom poms energetically, as opposed to the other kind who just wanted to get out of the rain and go home.

German!Smiz and I got into a slight arguement when I told him about the Big Bird balloon I saw the night before and he's all like, I don't remember there's a Big Bird in the Seasame Street that I grew up watching. And I was like, how can there be a Seasame Street without Big Bird? What kind of crazy Seasame Street were they showing in Germany? When the balloon came out though, he recognized Big Bird. But he told me that the character wasn't called Big Bird in Germany, which, I think was a flimsy explaination.

There were also some C-list celebrities, like Gloria Estefan and Barry Mannilow and non-C-list celebrity Julie Andrews. The parade would be much more exciting if Stephan Colbert popped out of nowhere and deck Barry Mannilow. Alas, that didn't happen.

Cupcakes

What's a New York trip without visiting a cupcake bakery? However, I don't want to do what everybody did and go to Magnolia. So I went to Billy's instead (my New Yorker friend said Billy's makes better cupcake anyway). I bought a chocolate cupcake with chocolate buttercream frosting. Besides making divine cupcakes, I also wanted to check out Billy's because I read from InStyle that the bakery has the dubious honour of being the favourite cupcake purveyor of the pre-Scientology brainwashed Kat(i)e Holmes. I doubt that she'll be eating Billy's cupcakes anymore though. If the Scientologist didn't brainwash her into hating cupcakes, befriending Victoria Beckham would surely put her cupcakes days to an end for good.

Anyway, back to my delicious and beautifully decorated cupcake! Look at that decorated pick on top of the cake! It's a pilgrim (with a fetching Anna Wintour-esque haircut) holding a freshly slaughtered turkey/duck/chicken. So festive! So Thanksgiving!

Then I walked all the way from Chelsea, through SoHo, through Chinatown, to the WTC site to burn off that cupcake.

Parsons
I just happened to walk by Parson's. I wanted to pop in and see if Tim Gunn was there. I'd die happy to hear Tim Gunn say to me, "I don't really see where you're going with this. But anyway, make it work." But Parsons was closed and the only people hanging out in the front porch/deck area was a few homeless people. I was tempted to tell them to "make it work" though.

The unadorned giant Christmas tree
My dad totally lied when he told me years ago that the tree was not one tree, but in fact, many smaller trees cut and paste into a big tree. I checked, it was just one freakin' huge tree. Myth=busted.

Store windows

Another famous NYC Christmas tradition.

At a random silverware store on fifth ave. That's a turkey made with spoons. It even had a wattle. Pretty neat.
The department store windows were pretty uneven though. I think Macy's was going with a oompa loompa/sugar plum fairy/Kylie Minogue concert set design with their windows. Which was whack. Also, how pretentious was it to put out velvet ropes in front of the windows so people had to line up to see the decorations. I just held my phone between people to take the picture.
The Bergdorf Goodman windows were pretty safe—in Bergdorf terms anyway. They were pretty to look at.






















Times Square

Seeing that the entire country was holed up at home enjoying their tyrptophan-induced post-turkey nap—if they haven't erupted into a drunken fist-fight with some relative that they only see once a year—most stores, except for the odd bodega and bagel shop, were close. Not Times Square though. God forbid if Times Square ever shuts down! That was great because the weather remained shitty throughout Thursday and the Sephora at Times Square was open, resulting in an hour of me trying on 50 different kinds of lip gloss as I tried to warm up my rain-soaked fingers.

After I left Sephora, I tried looking for this. But I could't tell where they hung him. Whatever. I hate David Blaine anyway. Also, I think that's when I dropped my Metro Card, which still had ten bucks on it. So because of David Blaine, I'm out ten dollars. Fucking jerk!

Then, I wandered pass this:
Possibly the greatest stroke of advertising genius there ever is. A roomful of super clean washrooms in the busy Times Square filled with Midwestern parents and their kids who needed to go pee every 30 minutes. The downside: the cha-cha-cha-Charmin! song was on a continual loop here. But did I mention how the place is SUPER clean?! Once the previous person finished using it, one of the staff will scurry into the stall and clean and fabreeze the place. Pretty awesome.

What's even awesomer, is that the place has a little stage and there's a guy dancing the Charmin dance on it. (Yes, there's a Charmin dance!) He also encouraged the patrons to dance with him.
I have a feeling that he's one of the many aspiring-Broadway performers in the area that has to work embarrassinging jobs in order to pay rent. That's cool. I respect that. But I can't help but wonder if this little jig is considered off-Broadway or not since it's literally on Broadway. I think he's not too bad and he looks pretty into it. You'll be the judge.


PS: I also popped by the Nintendo World after I visited the MoMA. However, the line to try out the Wii was ridiculously long. I couldn't even shoehorn my way to one of the millions of DS lying around. So Dan, I hope that you'll let me do that when I'm home for the break.