Minh and I hadn't been to The Big Apple in about 14 years. Needless to say. we were not the right people to be preparing Tai for the trip. Our first day in Manhattan Tai asked someone where we buy the tokens for the subway and was promptly laughed at and told that those were phased out in 1998. Whoops! Sorry, kid. Last time your Daddy and I were in Manhattan there were tokens.
One Day 2 Minh and I split from our Friends Who Know New York to venture out on our own and meet up with some old college friends who work in Manhattan. We needed to get ourselves from Central Park to Times Square and were told it was easy and would only take 15 minutes. Being a bit shy of taking the subway ourselves, we decided to take a cab. So we exited the park and found ourselves at a busy intersection. I walked to the edge of the sidewalk and tentatively waved my hand as if to say, "um...excuse me?....taxi? please?" After 10 minutes we decided this was not working. Maybe we needed a better corner? So we looked up our destination on our phones and decided to walk in that direction and continue to try to grab a cab. But then we saw that it was only 14 blocks, so we walked the whole way. This took more than the 15 minutes we had allotted and caused Tai to fall asleep in the stroller about 10 minutes before dinner, but we got there.
After dinner in Times Square we needed to get our butts all the way back to the hotel in Jersey. Gulp. We had our instructions. Take the A Train to 175th then get on the 186 bus. The friends we were dining with live all the way out in Queens, but graciously offered to walk us to the subway station. I accepted their help and told them they just needed to get us to the right station and we'd be fine from there. But when I asked them how we know whether to go "inbound or outbound" they decided then and there to accompany us all the way to the bus station. In the end, they went many miles and probably an hour out of their way to see us safely onto the 186 bus back to Jersey.
The only problem was we weren't sure where to get off the bus. I was goofing around with my phone, not paying any attention, when Minh said, "are you watching? we have to request the stop we want." Ugh, I looked out the window and didn't recognize anything, so we decided we'd already missed it. So we hit the stop request button and got off, somewhere in New Jersey, at 9pm. Certian that we'd missed our stop, we immediately did a 180 and started walking in the direction the bus had come from. I pulled up the hotel address on my phone and noticed (after 2 whole blocks) that we were going the wrong way. Apparently, we got off the bus a few stops too early. After that self-guided Walking Tour of Englewood, NJ, we made it back to the hotel by about 9:45pm. The next day we found ourselves on the 186 bus again. By this time we were seasoned travelers and it was daylight, so surely we'd get it right. That time we only got off 1 stop too early. We'd just about figured the whole bus thing out when it was time to head back home.
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2 comments:
Whoa! Someone *laughed* at a 3 year old for asking about tokens? What is with people?!
(Ahem, sorry about that, Tai).
ok, maybe i exaggerated a touch. it was our friend who laughed at tai's token comment and her laughter was really directed at me and minh, as we had obviously mis-informed tai about the ways of the subway.
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