Finding My Fix: Chronicles of a Travel Junkie

Mum rode the Chinatown bus up to NYC on Friday.  We headed up to MoMA to see the Edvard Munch exhibit since the museum is free to visitors on Fridays.  After that we headed over to 2nd Ave between 51st and 52nd Sts to see if we could get into a pub, but by this point (it was about 7pm) the street was flooded with tourists. 

I stopped at a corner as I pulled out my cell phone.  But I stopped a little too close to one of the pubs and two boys decked out in green with stupid green hats with shamrocks you wish you were wearing skooped my mother and I up in a group hug.  We stood there for a minute or two, the boys belting out some tune, before I realized, ok, Mum isn’t gonna do anything, so.  I pulled out of this group hug and it broke up. 

The boys started in on me, “Look at that smile!  Where are you from?”

“I’m from here.”

“Where?”

“Here, New York.”

“She is, did you hear that, she’s from New Yooook, New Yooook!”

“I’m an Arizonian!”

“A what?”

“An Arizonian.”

“Ah, ok I need to make a phone call.”

“Wait, you gonna get my number too?”

Mum and I slipped around the corner and I made my call.  As I was talking to my friend (a friend I met in New Zealand in fact), I heard a funny sound coming from one of the phone booths on the corner.  And then I noticed a small river coming from the corner of the phone booth, and in front of the river, a man with his back to us.  I moved away laughing and fairly incapable of talking on the phone.  My mum soon noticed and the look on her face was brilliant.

By the time I had finished my call, the man was still relieving himself, and a cop stood nonchalantly waiting behind him.  The man noticed the cop, picked up the telephone receiver,  and turned around.  Mum and I staid to watch three other cops stroll up to the corner nonchalantly as the four of them surrounded the man who swaggered like he might think there were eight cops surrounding him.  A little girl walked by holding her father’s hand.

“You see that?  That little girl has to walk in your pee” the first cop said.

The light changed and Mum and I didn’t stay to watch the man arrested.  We were distracted by men in kilts and Scotland T-shirts hailing cabs (wrong holiday, mate).  Tartan Week is next month, April 1-8 (and you better believe I’ll be celebrating my Scotish ancestry).

Mum and I took the subway downtown where I feel a million times more comfortable since it’s my part of the city.  We roamed around on 2nd Ave between 9th and 7th until we found a place to get dinner and laugh about our two minutes on the corner of 2nd Ave and 51st St. Virage was the name of the restaurant and it was delicioso mediterranean cuisine.

It’s funny how you can have such an adventure in your home town.  I’ve been living in NYC for two years and still have not been to Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and Friday was my first time in MoMA.  I take this city for granted.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 9:32 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.