Jolt Country

I thought I posted this, but I guess I didn't.

Yesterday, I drove from Oklahoma to Chicago.

Tonight, I'm catching an Amtrak train from Chicago to NYC. 21 hours, so I sprung for a private room.

I'll be in NYC all next week for work, heading back to Chicago Friday/Saturday, and driving back home on Sunday.

Whee!

Also, I wish I could get iPhone tethering working in the next four hours. I've tried three different apps/techniques and none of them worked. Suck.

22 hours on a train is a long time.

Also, New York is amazing. It's not like Oklahoma. At all.

Good amazing or bad amazing? I'm heading there in late May and am kind of steeling myself for crowds, expenses and muggings.


THE
PRE CONCEIVED
AARDVARK

(maybe I should just start reading your blog again)

Good amazing. I have spent all my time in southern Manhattan so far, although I'm hoping to get north tonight. There are a lot of people here and they aren't friendly but they aren't unfriendly either. They just don't really care about you (unless you're walking slow).

For what it's worth, I feel safer here than I do in D.C.

Hey Aardvark, you can subscribe to my blog at the following link:

http://www.robohara.com/subscribe.php

Wordpress will automatically notify you every time I post a new blog entry (usually no more than 1 per day). You can unsubscribe from the same link at any time. Your e-mail address will never get used for anything else (I don't even think I can see them). If you're on Facebook or Twitter, I send out automated updates there as well. I guess if you really want I could just call you whenever a good one goes online. :)

I actually considered a "VIP Book Package" that would include an hour-long phone call from me. It wouldn't scale very well, but I thought it would be a unique thing to offer.

I am sitting in New York City's Penn Station right now, waiting in a train. That's one thing I learned this week about the metro and trains. There's always waiting involved. I also learned that there's a lot of walking and your feet will hurt if you wear non-walking shoes.

All the pictures I've taken throughout my NYC visit can be viewed here:

http://www.robohara.com/photo/index.php ... icago_2010

Hey, how were the native New Yorkers while you were out? Obnoxious? I only met one person I wanted to punch out in Boston - I couldn't find the escalators at PAX so I asked a security guard. And he was all, "ehhhhhhh yeaaahhhhh there's over dere" like I was a moron for not realizing that they are behind everyone as you walk in and - URGE TO KILL: RISING.

I hope New Yorkers treated you better, but I'm not gonna be surprised if they didn't. I will be angry. But not surprised.

(Also, PAX would have been better with you.)

Aw, shucks.

I was expecting the people of New York to be brunt and rude, but instead they just ignore you. If I took too long in a crosswalk or on a sidewalk, they just walk around you. I don't think I had anyone yell at me specifically or be directly rude to me.

I had trouble understanding some of the people I ordered food from (especially foreign vendors running food carts) but I saw other people having trouble as well so I didn't feel bad. I saw a Chinese guy trying to order food from a Croatian vendor and the conversation digressed into them just saying "What?" and "Huh?" back and forth for a few minutes.

I also learned the word "stayogo", which really means "stay-or-go", which really means "Is that for here or to go?" They don't even ask it like a question like "stayogo?", it's just l ike "stayogo". If you say "for here" that throws them off -- you're supposed to say "stay". Oh, and at Burger King I said "stay" and later I checked the receipt and saw a 75 cent "dine in tax". Shoulda said "go".

The town I live in (Yukon, a suburb of Oklahoma City) is 25 square miles and has 20,000 people. Manhattan is 22 square miles and has 2.8 million people. Actually they have 1.6 million at night and 2.8 million during the day because 1.2 million people come into the city every day. The biggest thing I noticed other than the traffic and the skyscrapers were the people.

I'm in Durham, NC today. Heading back to OKC tomorrow.

Directions: Get on I-40, drive 1,200 miles west, exit at my house.

By the way, in case you're headed out that way, there was a gigantic rock slide and 50 miles of I-40 are closed. For six months. Who knew? My life is so tied up in technology -- computers, viruses, programming -- that I wouldn't expect it to take us -- the goddamn human race -- 6 months to remove rocks from the road. Have we no bulldozers? Have we no dynamite? What happened to prisoner chain gangs?

Seriously. Rocks. Six months. What the hell?

In NYC as I type. Never, NEVER drive a car within the city limits of this place.

More later...

A slightly updated post. Back in the hotel at midnight. Spent a lot of time riding the subways to Astoria and back. That's in Queens, btw. I haven't been here since 1986, they must have painted. The people here aren't bad unless they are behind a steering wheel. They mostly ignore you, as Flack said. I'll take lots of pix and post the good ones here. Have a graduation tomorrow and then sightseeing. More then.


THE
TRAVEL DAY
AARDVARK

Awesome, look forward to seeing the pix.

I'm in Chicago this week, having a great time working and hanging with family. I'll be in Denver in three weeks and I am looking forward to hanging with the other Robb and Captain Pinback.

Day two:

Beautiful weather, kinda hot, but that makes up for having to shovel my driveway by hand last Feb......Right?

Central Park today. The Lincoln Center (graduation was there)

More subway rides (my company actually built parts for the new R160 train cars, nice to see the parts in the field)

Had authentic New York pizza for dinner, crust so thin you could read the Times through it. I prefer Chicago style, but when in Nuyawk...also, Yankees played the Mets tonight, every goddam TV in teh city was tuned to the game. Guess it would not have been a good idea to ask the restaurant to change over to the Blackhawks. Back in the hotel by midnight again, This town doesn't sleep.


THE
FRANK WAS RIGHT
AARDVARK

Yeah, it's rivalry weekend in baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays had their fierce and bitter rivals the Arizona Diamondbacks tonight. I'm surprised there wasn't a spree killing actually, with all the decades of hatred that goes back generations. I'm just saying that if someone jumps onto the pitcher's mound tomorrow with a dynamite trench coat, people are gonna be like, "Yeah, I understand it, there's been bad blood there since like 1877."

Flack wrote:Awesome, look forward to seeing the pix.

I'm in Chicago this week, having a great time working and hanging with family. I'll be in Denver in three weeks and I am looking forward to hanging with the other Robb and Captain Pinback.

It's gonna be a PARTY. I'm inviting all my friends but one only because we need someone to bail us out of jail! Okay, not really. I did notice this - it being the 30th Anniversary of Pac-Man (I guess I could look it up, but I wonder what day they are using for the birthday: the first cab made, or shipped or what) I noticed that Pinback set the high score on Pac and entered "YOU SUCK" as the name. So it's gonna be like - well, if we end up playing that game or something, he was talking to me when he wrote that, Flack, not you or your wife or kids. I have to clarify this now everytime the games come on and there are people over, that is, until I can beat his core 10 times (and I haven't even beaten it once).

AArdvark wrote:Had authentic New York pizza for dinner, crust so thin you could read the Times through it. I prefer Chicago style, but when in Nuyawk...

God, I would murder a pizza like that right now, in cold blood. I don't know if there's much better than NY style pizza at 1:38 in the morning. That's one of the things I hate about living in the suburbs. It is literally impossible for me to get pizza right now unless I "cook" it myself, scare quot-- SNEER quotes!!

Over the past two months I've had pizza in both New York and Chicago. In Oklahoma, both New York Style and Chicago Style pizzas will be deep dish, although both the pizzas I had in NYC and CHI were thin crust. Every time I get pizza in Chicago, it's cut into squares. The NYC pizza I got was at some pizza-by-the-slice place in Times Square. It reminded me of S'Barros -- so big you had to fold it in half just to keep it together.

I don't think there is such a thing as Oklahoma-style pizza, although there is one place here that serves BBQ pulled pork on a pizza, so that's about it.

Day three:

Times square then the Circle Line cruise around the island, after that, pub food and shopping down on Canal St. It seems that there is just not enough demand for knock off purses, knock off sunglasses, knock off perfume or knock off watches in this part of the world. I will post my theory about this later.


THE
NOW I KNOW
AARDVARK

That's a fun area. During my last visit, I stayed at the Holiday Inn on the corner of Canal and Lafayette. If you're looking for one, next door is an old Chinese woman selling toddler-sized clothes that say "New York Fucking City" on them.

I am so going to cover all these topics! I'm even making notes about it so I don't leave anything out. I just have to find the time to get it down on text. Never fear!