adventurous

Onto our second day in New York. As great as we hear that the New York transit system is, we headed to the Transit Museum as the first place on our agenda. We explored about in the museum and learned about some of the history and information about the construction of the transit railroads. There were many displays of the old and new metro station entrances. One display that I found interesting was the New York Subway fare from time to time, with the first type of metro fare being a paper ticket, then later transformed to a coin, then to different sizes of tokens, and lastly to the metro card that it has today from the year of 1994. Now these were all at the upper level of the museum, and the lower level of the museum showcased all of the metro trains from the oldest to the newest.
After a while of exploration in the museum, we headed to Shake Shack for lunch, a burger chain that is quite popular in the east coast I believe. After lunch, we headed towards the Brooklyn Bridge since it was not too far away. However, as we were approaching to the bridge (or thought we were nearby and almost there), we came to figure that we were actually standing quite far away from it. And to actually step foot onto the bridge, a very long walk was required and we did not had the time to do so. Therefore, we greeted the bridge from quite far away as well as giving it a farewell. Now off we went -- Flushing Chinatown! Right when we got up from the metro station underground, we see huge waves of people. It did indeed felt a bit like the streets in Hong Kong. We walked for a while in the outdoor shops before we decided to head back into the New World Mall with its air conditioning. Then we shopped around the New World Supermarket and later went downstairs to the food court area. We all bought some drinks and food there, mainly boba and some Xiao Long Bao. Here is when I finally tried Gong Cha, while some of the others tried Kung Fu Tea. On our way to Times Square, we made a stop at the Grand Central station, where we explored a bit around the area. Then onto the last stop on our agenda -- Times Square!
The first thing you would notice at Times Square is of course the very bright LED plaques shown almost everywhere on the main streets. They indeed look very colorful and beautiful even in daytime, so I would expect them to look even prettier in nighttime. Times Square is famous and well known for all its shopping stores, but we didn’t explored those and instead went about into the stores that we normally would not have the chance to visit here in SF. Along our journey in Times Square, we went to the Disney store, the M&M store, the Hershey store, Sanrio, the Nintendo store, and lastly the Lego store. At the Nintendo store was where I added another plushie to my collection -- Kirby, one of my childhood memories! With our adventurous journey, we actually walked about Times Square twice, from 42nd Avenue to 48th Avenue, then back to 42nd and then lastly to 48th again... (Long story but I guess, good experience, of walking at least) Later, we walked just two more blocks down to 50th Ave. and took the bus from there to 32nd because there is no way we are going to walk back there for the third time. It was actually Koreatown that we choose to eat dinner at. We were walking about the town, as it was only one street, while waiting for our table at Five Senses, the Korean restaurant. What I found that was quite shocking and surprising was that there were a total of four karaoke places in just one street. Wow, how nice! We then went back into the restaurant and had a wonderful meal with some spices (yes, some very great spicy food). After dinner, we crossed to the other side of the street to Paris Baguette and H Mart to buy our breakfast for tomorrow morning. On our way back to the hotel, half of our group wanted to explore the Madison Square Garden, which is the arena for many sport games. Unfortunately, it was closed already when we arrived so we just had to head back to our hotel. Overall, to describe today in one word -- adventurous!
-Shirley Tsang