I bought my ritual coffee to perk myself up [always makes me happy], and because the coffee machine in my company's pantry gives expresso that is less thick than our average kopitiam kopi, i happily ordered a 'double expresso'. And it WAS a double expresso. I stared at the little cup the guy handed me and then transfered my gaze to the coffeemachine.. haha it was a proper one! the kind from starbucks! that makes proper gao3 copi! heh heh! not that we dun have starbucks here they're everywhere but i just haven't tried it.. expensive lah! actually our company cafe uses starbucks coffeebeans but they still prepare it the crappy way, like americano coffee.
So i had to ask the guy to change it to a cappucino.. Haha.. i refuse to drink real expressos. Other than the horrible taste, also because a lady who ordered a double from me everyday when i was working at five foot cafe told me that she got headaches when she stopped. He must have thought i was kinda weird haha but at least he charged me less for a double shot cappucino.. hehe. best coffee i ever had in a while! happy..
This man was walking down the carriages. As he passed our group, he went 'chink chink chink.. ' hmm. At this point I shall express my opinion on such racial terms. I've always thought that these are just words. They don't even mean anything. they're just like, a short form of 'chinese' isn't it? Just like we call ah neh ah neh and hongkies hongkies but we don't mean it to be derogatory? Why make a big fuss out of it. It's really up to u to decide whether you wanna be silly enough to feel offended. But then again I was still pretty offended when he did that. Not that I could have done anything about it. Thats what happens when you're the minority in a country. Hell i'm not even the minority.. I'm just a nobody. Anyway, it's pretty funny when we call ourselves chinks but when he said it it just didn't feel good. I guess it's the way u say it, he was kinda like muttering under his breath, like we were scum or something.. haha.
Oh, anyway he was like, walking down the carriages, asking for money or something. And the silly thing was that we were going to the South Ferry station and we had to be in the 1st 5 carriages to get off. [i guess cos the station is shorter than the train?] So we were like, in his way for the first carriage, and when the train stopped, we had to run forward a carriage such that we could reach the 1st 5 carriage. And we did that a few times, and each time we would reach the carriage b4 him, and he would come through and see us again. haha. probably irritated the hell outta him.
I thought qianyi made a really funny comment, that compared to the subways here, singapore's MRT looks futuristic. hehe. i cldn't agree more.
We bought our ferry tickets! and there was no queue! shiok!
waiting for the ferry.. do i look good in sepia?
On the ferry lu! cool backdrops of the city skyline
natural hor?
Four idiots.
The original torch she held. Started leaking water so the americans built a new one made of 24k gold such that it reflected the sun's rays in the day and reflected spotlights at night.
View from beneath her! the interesting structure designed by mr eiffel!
Photography tip #1 do not ever let anyone take your photo from below. It is very unflattering and enlarges ur ahem, nostrils.
cute pic! the guys' hair are either too short or too long haha so retro jy
Now that I've finally visited the statue of liberty, I can proudly say I've visited America! It's just one of those things that give me a natural high, like niagara falls. Even though liberty was smaller than I imagined, I felt entirely.. liberated [pardon the cornyness] when standing at her feet, imagining the French people who contributed to her, the Americans who contributed to her pedestal, the amount of work they went through, designing, hammering bit by bit with their low technology tools. Helped that the view was spectacular. Loved it!
We next walked down to Wall Street. Er, wrestled with the bull there.
SEE the difference good weather makes? the picture on the right was taken the previous day when we were denied entry..
We walked all 86 storeys!! heh no lah. let me do some complaining here. The stupid empire state building made us wait to wait to wait to wait. Even though we bought the tix before hand, they initially made us queue along with those buying tickets. [Queue #1] Ok, so after a while they let us through [i dunno why so kok up] and we went through a security check [they looked at my can of coffee suspiciously] and then it was another grand queue #2 to get the the lifts. That took about an hour. When we finally took the lifts to the 80th floor, we were introduced to queue #3 which was to take some dumbass photo infront of a green screen so that they cld what, adobe some nice view and we could pay heaps of $ for it later. So damn irritating, they could have just told us we cld skip it if we didn't want the photo, but they just made us queue up for it. After the stupid photo then they informed us that we could walk up the remaining 6th floors or wait for the lift. Obviously we opted for walking up, hence the above photo.
Yes after 6 floors we finally reached the top.. the place where Meg Ryan and Tom Hank met in sleepless in seattle, where kingkong conquered.. heheh. The view? Not fantastic at all. New York is full of dreary brown/grey buildings. So boring! it's supposed to be much nicer at night with the lights but we weren't abt to spend more precious time there.. so crappy!
Check out the traffic.. heh. Actually I found that traffic isn't as terrible as i imagined. At least the cars on the street actually Move. In fact we probably could have drove around.. but I guess it's more of a parking problem cos parking is very expensive ba.
And on the empire state building, my lovely T-mobile phone was tested and found to have pathetic signal. Wah lau eh it really sucks. At times where it had signal, i received msgs from YX saying that he had bought our broadway tickets for us! happy happy! we were gonna watch beauty and the beast by disney. hah watch kids' show.. too bad lah we are engineers cannot watch too arty farty one later dun understand. keke.
Oh. I have to add this. as we were going down, there was a nice snakey queue #4 just to get to the LIFTS!!!! i so hate empirestate building. so cheat money!
because YX was gonna watch another show at another theater, we had to rush down to get the tix from him.. feel very bad lah he buy tix for us and in the end still have to wait for us and everything. In the end JY had to run all the way from the subway station to the theatre to get the tix.. while the rest of us tried our best to hurry up. heh heh. xinku ta le!
posh broadway theatre! we were so casually dressed [think birkies heh] but luckily we weren't refused entry. well there was this father sitting 2 seats from me and he was wearing berms ok! so i'm like, not that bad loh.. heh.
that's the only photo i took, of the startin screen. I did have the urge to take movie clips of the very fun musical, but stopped myself cos.. I guess it's out of respect for the arts, you know like they practise so much, and I just make a pirated copy kinda thing. and out of fear that my flash will go off or something and embarrass myself haha. Oh well, like what chye or was it quek said about not photographing every single thing, but enjoying it as it was.. I try to live by that sometimes.
The musical was really enjoyable, however it wasn't quite satisfying. All the costumes and songs were the same as that of the disney movie. I was looking forward to seeing how the beast would be portrayed, how he would change from beast, soften up and become the charming prince and all. I loved it in the movie when he would be all rude and w/o manners, and then started learning to use a fork and stuff.. and his whole expression would soften up.. looking a lil confused at times. That was soo soo cute. But it was totally lacking in the broadway show. I guess it was really difficult for him to portray that but I felt that he could have made better use of body language, such as heaving to show the beastiness and stuff.. but he was just lukewarm and bland. blah.
gaston was cute i suppose. and lumiere. heheh.
grand chandeliers
they have trishaws here too! some are more futuristic looking. The riders shout to gain attention and hopefully pick up passengers after the show. I even saw a girl in her 20s? riding one in shorts. So interesting.
the lunt fontane
everyone loves gaston!
We met up with YX after the show to go look for a supper/dinner place, and on the way we saw this:
this man is truly talented. His performance was one of the highlights of my NYC trip. What he was doing was to create art with spray paint. He would cover parts with objects, and then spray over with different colours.
The most amazing part was he would then use a small scrunched up piece of card and then start to scrape away parts of the wet paint such that white showed up. At first sight you would think that he was randomly scraping it. It takes a while to realise that he is actually forming the skyline of NYC. including the twin towers of world trade center. And it is done with such grace and skill, you can actually see depth and shadows and the skyline to a lot of detail.
My description probably doesn't do his work justice at all but I was really touched by it. Each step he continued to take just made me grow further in awe of his talents. His work wasn't expensive, he sold them at $15 each, 2 for $25. I kinda wanted to support him but i refused to buy such stuff cos i just don't want another piece of stuff lying around.. And i wasn't sure if it was appropriate to like, tip him so i didn't. ha, excuses right. but I really appreciated what he was doing. luckily later on JY bought one at least so got support him a bit.
I was kinda disturbed by the fact that he was spraying a lot of paint onto his hands.. and also without a mask. so much paint on his skin and poisonous fumes inhaled per night.. i really hope he doesn't get sick or something.
after many streets down, we found our Bread Factory Cafe. but we didn't really have the appetite for sandwiches/pizzas/dessert. So we trudged on to find a korean restaurant..
Here we are.
first time im eating korean food in a restaurant. not too enjoyable. give me japanese anytime. Oh well. time for me to get back to my work.. it is late! hope i don't oversleep tmr! til then.. take care my friends.. i miss all of u!!
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