New York City

 

      More like HapChap in New York City... at least for the past weekend. Not only was I, HapChap, in NYC this past weekend but I was lucky enough to be accompanied by the ever so beautiful Caybabe. If you don't know who Caybabe is, you're really missing out. She's pretty much an All-Star who helped me paint the city red all weekend. Thanks to Caylee (Caybabe), we stayed at a friends apartment in Gramercy off E23d street in between 2nd and 3d Ave. Took Friday off from the work force and jumped on a bus to the big bad city Thursday night. Check out just a few highlights of our trip below:

      As much as I'd like to think of myself as a city goer or "local" as we call it in surf city, I was very much a tourist to NYC and proud of it. We started off by taking an overly expensive cab ride downtown to ground zero. This was before we realized how convenient and easy the subway is. Not the metro, the subway. Get it right. I was promptly corrected by and gentleman with a strict New York accent. Anyways, ground zero was quite the site. I was there about 6 years ago with my mom and sisters when the memorial was not built. It was emotional to see the two pools and names engraved on the side. Very powerful. Freedom tower is quite appealing as well, construction on the second tower is currently underway. Don't want to dwell on the topic too much but there was a certain sense of pride that came over me while I silently read the names of first response teams and many others.

     Caylee and I then headed a few blocks east (I think) towards Wall Street. Pretty anti-climatic if you ask me, but it was cool to see New Yowwkkk stock brokers smoking cigarettes outside the trading floor stretching their fingers headsets on and everything. Was also interesting to stand at the foot of Deutsche Bank who was responsible for shorting the housing market using credit default swaps. Insurance companies didn't quite understand the investment until the boom and bust happened and Greg Lippmann was on the right side of his bets against subprime mortgages. Small tangent yes, if further interested in whatever it was I just said follow up on the facts here. Walked past the famous bull but there were too many foreigners to even waste my time touching the big guy. Instead we jumped on the subway and headed uptown to Grand Central Station to get a bit to eat and meet a friend for drinks. 

     Drinks went well, sent Ben off to Cape Cod, and then headed back to "our" apartment to shower up and go to dinner. Extra Virgin was the venue of choice. For dinner that is. Great spot in the West Village! Usually don't take photos of foot and share them with the public but the ahi tuna with avacado and some secret sauce was absolutely delicious. We followed dinner up by walking to The Standard hotel rooftop bar for some high life dancing and people watching. They even had a Neutella crepe bar tucked in the corner for the sweet and savory individuals. Hey we met some cool German people too! Check it out:

     Not trying to drag this post out but Friday was an incredible day. What did we do the rest of the weekend? New York bagels and coffee, seaport district for discounted tickets, seeing Annie On Broadway, Central Park adventures, Dylan's Candy Bar, shopping, mango with chili powder, canal street, sketchy Asian parks, shopping, sweating, skate park searching, upper east side dreaming, west village brunch, Magnolia Cupcakes, highline park and the meatpackig industry, and embarrassingly running to catch a bus at Port Authority. Overall one of the best weekend of my life. Some photos I took below: