mokudekiru

Or ESTA, for short. My friend Noam and I are both interning in different Pennsylvania cities this summer, and decided to take the week before her job started to explore the East Coast. Everything went fabulously smoothly, so here’s a recap of what we did and how to get the most out of a short trip to several fabulous and famous cities.

Our general trajectory was:
Chicago → Philly → NYC → Boston → Philly

Noam’s job is in Philly, so we made that our home base. We departed last Tuesday, stayed with friends at UChicago for a night, before heading to Philly to drop our stuff off, and catching a bus to NYC. We didn’t have a car, so all transportation must be public. Things we booked ahead of time:

• The flight from ORD → PHL, obviously
• All bus rides, which was 5 total, because there’s no direct Boston → Philly bus, you have to get off at Penn Station in NYC and switch buses. We used megabus for the first three buses and BoltBus on the way back from Boston to Philly. BoltBus had nice leather seats, and we took earlier buses than we had reserved because we were scared we wouldn’t make the connecting bus, so we were standbys and they always had a spot for us. Megabus was nice because there were two levels and we got a good view of the cities we drove through. Both bus companies had crappy, horrible, yet existing, internet. Both were much cheaper than the Amtrak option.
• Hotel in New York. We stayed at the Wellington which we of course cross-checked with the Bedbug Registry, as bedbugs weren’t really on our list of things to experience in NYC. This hotel was good, though a bit noisy (thin walls, hear people opening/closing doors, etc.) but had a great location, literally one of its doors opens to a subway entrance. Super convenient.
• Tickets to a comedy show for our first night in NYC, at the UCB Theatre which we had heard was good on the internets. It was.

Alright, now onto the stories and the photos!

Wednesday: The Three-City Whirlwind Tour
We woke up in Chicago, and took a 7:15 cab to O’Hare. It took an hour and a half (it would take about half an hour with no traffic). We were very stressed about missing our 9:35 flight, and without a seriously skilled cab driver who was willing to do things like get off the highway and get back on, we would have missed our flight. An evil lady at security who forced Noam to squeeze her rolling-suitcase into the carry-on size limit box didn’t help either, as we had to spend 15 minutes emptying it enough to fit, while everyone else walked by with much larger suitcases. We made our flight with 10 minutes to spare before takeoff.

A very short flight later, we landed in Philly, got no information out of anyone at the airport about transportation to the UPenn campus (the lady kept saying “call them yourself” and I didn’t really feel like getting her to explain who “them” was when she refused to say anything other than that one sentence). So we took a cab to Noam’s apartment, dumped our stuff, and ogled her 22nd story view of Philly:

We then walked down the street for some delicious Indian food and took one of the best pictures I have ever seen:

Got to sit at the front of the top level of the megabus, and saw lots of Philly as we left.

The bus took an extremely long time as we ran into evening rush hour traffic. Got to NYC around 6 PM, dumped our stuff at the hotel, grabbed a snack, and took the subway to our show which started at 8.

UCB Theatre was a pretty small venue, around 100 people in the audience. We had reserved tickets online for two comedy shows in a row, both of which were 5 bucks and very funny. The host of the first show did an icebreaker based around this incredible ad from ediets.com, shown below. From 0:18-0:35 is really the significant part of the video. Then he had the audience recreate the jingle, with a third of the audience singing each of the three lines of “ediets.com / now you got it going on / now you got it going o-on”

The funniest guy was John Mulaney, who writes for SNL, and told us about many things, including how Justin Bieber terrorized him in the hallway once while being the musical guest for SNL, and how he was both ashamed and touched to have the world’s busiest and richest teenager and his crew laugh at him.

At UCB Theatre Noam and I ran into two different friends from high school. Our high school is 800+ miles away from NYC. It also has 300 total students, so counting above and below our grades for the years we were there, we know roughly 540 people who graduated from our high school. Total. This venue had 100 people there, tops. And four of them were from our high school. Insanely small odds. Unfortunately, we hadn’t worked “running into random friends from high school” into the NYC plan, so we didn’t get a chance to hang out with them later, though we received invitations, they would be for when we were back in Philly. Alas.

Thursday: Epic NYC Exploration

So… one day in NYC to fill, unplanned, what do you do?

Step 1: Bagels and Coffee. We wandered northwest-ish from our hotel and found Bagel Stix for generous amounts of cream cheese and lox on bagels, and iced cappuccinos.

Step 2: Central Park Proposal. Brought the bagels with us to have a bagel picnic. On the way to our picnic spot, we passed by a couple, walking on a little dirt path near the street. Right as Noam and I passed by the guy, the guy was down on his knee, and proposed! I was sort of confused as his choice of proposal spot (random dirt path? Not near the road but not away from it either?) or why he didn’t wait until we were more than 1.5 feet away (there was no one else coming after us), but we just rolled with it and watched them hug and kiss and be happy because they’re getting married. Noam’s camera has paparazzi level zoom, so here’s the happy couple:

Step 3: Finish bagels and wander Central Park until you get to the Met. You know, like Gossip Girl. I don’t really understand how Serena and whatever the friend’s name is have tender BFF moments on the steps of the Met, because there were so many friggin’ people. Oh well.

Step 4: Strawberry Fields. Takes you back south through the park.

Step 5: Buy shoes. We passed by an Aldo, my favorite shoe place in the world (actually, we passed by like 6 that day) and both got new shoes at relatively inexpensive prices (for Aldo). When I was trying on my new gladiator sandals (how ever did I go so long without them?!) a girl sat down next to me trying on some other shoes, and complimented the shoes I was trying on (which is odd, it’s not like they were even mine yet… I guess she’s complimenting my taste in shoes? I also felt slightly bad because they were the last pair of that style). Then she decided to kind of sadly complain about how she lost her job two weeks ago and is getting nicer shoes for all the job interviews she was going to. I think if I’d stayed a few more minutes I would have heard her whole life story. So…that was a depressing conversation.

Step 6: LOVE. You just gotta. It’s all you need.

Step 7: Times Square. It’s famous. There weren’t that many people there though. Not really busy, kinda a letdown.

Step 8: The Village, Soho. Went there for walking around, shopping, etc. Had coffee at Think Coffee near NYU. It was getting chilly out and I hadn’t brought a jacket, so we shopped at a few stores in Soho until I found a shirt at UNIQLO! So glad they’re in NYC, and I also bought clothes to stay warm from UNIQLO in Osaka. Good times at UNIQLO, though I think I actually liked the clothes at the NYC one better than the ones in Japan.

Step 9: Rain and Chinatown. It started pouring, so we went to Chinatown and entered the first restaurant we saw, and consumed fish soup and eggplants and were happy. We purchased bread at a bakery that claimed to have read bean in it. The next day we found, tragically, there was no red bean. We were so ripped off.

Step 10: Empire State Building. We thought we may as well see it on our way home, so we got off the subway at the appropriate place, and realized that since we were standing right under the building we couldn’t actually SEE it (you know, skyscrapers are tall). Instead, we did find K-Town, which was friggin’ awesome. And very nice at night (probably 11 PM ish?)

Step 11: Froyo at Pinkberry, and KARAOKE. You just gotta. Thank you, K-Town, for having karaoke. So much Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were sung. Also the karaoke room was friggin’ enormous.

Step 12: Subway back to hotel! And sleep! Job well done!

Friday: NYC → Boston

First, we got breakfast at Radiance Tea where we experienced matcha lattes and mochi. BEST BREAKFAST EVER, and like a 1 minute walk from the hotel.

Then we got on the bus at Penn Station to Boston and suffered a long bus ride. Batia (who we were visiting in Boston) met us, took us to Boston Chinatown while we waited for the bus to Waltham. Bubble tea. Good times. When we arrived, Batia, MPitt and friends were holding a vegetarian BBQ in their backyard. Delicious!

Saturday: Epic Boston Exploration

Walked 13 miles! Saw 3 colleges!
Here is the map of our route

Here’s what we saw:

Newberry Street for shopping, where they had an Espresso!

Noam’s Gnomies, also on Newberry:

Boston Commons & Gardens:

Took the Freedom Trail through downtown to see some famous old stuff:

Batia’s favorite, graveyards!

Went to the water:

Crossed the river to cambridge, visited MIT’s Stata Center since I am really into seeing cool CS buildings around the world.

Went to Harvard Square, where it started to rain, and we ate at a Vietnamese place. Afterwards we explored Harvard and found where Noam used to go to daycare!

Gotta do something with signs.

And then we waited through several buses to get back to Waltham. Creepy middle aged dude on the bus kept asking us what our ‘party plans’ were there. We didn’t answer him, but agreed that we had party plans, they were just exclusive (mainly, excluding him.)

Then, we experienced the awesome that is Eurovision. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a singing-contest among all the countries in Europe, each who send a representative to sing some ridiculous pop song, and then all the countries vote on each other and a winner is selected. Batia says the insanity of Eurovision makes her proud to be an American (we don’t participate). I gotta say, this was one of the more patriotic moments of my life.

The winner, as we found out after like four hours of pure awesome, was Lena from Germany:

Anyway, that was Boston, and the next day we went back from Boston → NYC → Philly and finished unpacking into Noam’s place, and I snagged an empty room from one of her future roommates who hadn’t moved in.

Philly Adventures

The sightseeing Noam and I did in Philly involved checking out Philly history near Independence Hall, etc. We even got these sweet badges from folding our map correctly at the Independence Center. However, this meant we got a ton of extra attention throughout the day as all the tour guides and such would question why we got junior ranger badges (did we deserve them?) and whether we even counted as “junior” as we are clearly not children. We didn’t see any kids with the badges, which probably means we’re just really good at map-folding (well, Noam is… I watched.)

They’re pretty into the Liberty Bell there. Not as much as Ben Franklin though. Apparently he was the man. Noam is also pro-liberty:

The rest of this week, Noam went to work while I became an expert on cafes in the UPenn area. If you need a cafe, I have some pretty strong opinions on: Capogiro Gelato (good!), Lovers & Madmen, and Green Line Cafe (meh!). I wrote yelp reviews for all of them so you can read about my horrible and good experiences if you care.

The reason I had to become such an expert at cafes was that I needed to be at them ALL day while Noam was at work. The security measures at her apartment were kind of insane, and they wouldn’t give a guest card to me, so we had to spend 5 minutes signing me in every time. Bleh. That meant I couldn’t be there during the day, and her roommates’ (once they showed up) 9 PM bedtime and their demands for library-like silence meant that I shouldn’t really be there at night, either. We stayed away from the apartment and galavanted around Philly with a bunch of new and old friends, including eating with Noam’s new REU buddies and such.

After a week of repeat visits to UPenn cafes, Ben Franklin statues, Chinatown, and Lorenzo’s Pizza, I am off to Pittsburgh for a while. Summer is officially rung in.

Oh, and all the other pictures are here as always.