Packed

Our second day at New York City was completely packed. We probably visited something within the proximity of 50 tourist attractions, and I probably could have spent a good couple of hours in each of them, but we didn’t. The morning started with a trip to NYC’s Transit Museum, which finds fascination from the fact that the museum itself is built in an old NYC metro station. The old-fashioned, advertisement plastered old metro trains were surprisingly intriguing. The only thing that could make the museum better is the introduction of functioning trains with designs from the 50’s. I’d give anything to ride in one of those. From all the movies I’ve seen that features NYC, the most pervasive landmark would likely be NYC’s Grand Central Station. Grand Central turned out to be exactly what I imagined it to be and nothing more—an extremely crowded train station. I learned on this day that New Yorkers, contrary to how they are painted in the movies do not, in fact walk at the speed of light and push people out of their way to get to where they need to go. From Grand Central, we took what was probably the longest metro ride I’ve ever had to Flushing, Queens. Flushing is dubbed as the second, more contemporary Chinatown of NYC and this is undoubtedly true; it seems that many seniors head over to the Chinatown in the tenement district to hang out, while a large majority of the youth hang out at Flushing. I can’t help but get a Hong Kong feel from Flushing. Aside from the recent construction of super high-rises in Hong Kong shopping districts, Flushing and Hong Kong have very similar landscapes and street designs (but maybe that’s just me). The highlight of Flushing for me is definitely Nan Xiang Dumpling house. I swear, I’ve been to Shanghai and the Shanghai dumplings at this small NYC establishment are unquestionably better. Before all you Shanghainese people kill me, I was on a guided tour so they probably led me to unauthentic, tourist trap restaurant. My vision of Time Square also wasn’t too distant from reality—blocks and blocks of shopping, nothing more, nothing less. There were a couple of specialty stores like M&Ms, Hershey's, Disney, and Nintendo. If you ever stop by Time Square for the first time, I highly recommend visiting these specialty stores and not clothing chains like H&M that you could probably find anywhere else. We ended the day with dinner at a Korean restaurant named Five Senses in NYC’s “Koreatown”. Needless to say, the spice burned my soul with the radiance of a thousand suns. I’d rather not recount this experience.
-David Yi