I thought the ocassion of being on another --albeit brief-- roadtrip would be a good excuse to return to this blog.
Astoria, NY turns out to be friendly and social and active, but also laid back like Brooklyn is. I'd been here once before to stay for one night on a very last-minute plan. This trip is a more amenable motive: to visit a friend from study abroad who recently relocated from San Franscisco. We were supposed to be joined by other mutual friends from our program/school, but unfortunately, they were called away by other plans and weren't able to make it. Still, being here is a reminder of simplicity at its finest: just chilling out on a Saturday night, Hampshire style, and catching up at the same time. I should add that my friend's place is extraordinary -- free housing provided in exchange for work. Five of them volunteers for this work program (a "city-year" esque gig) live on the top floor of a former Catholic convent which once housed nuns. From the outside it's all imposing and brick; the inside looks like the film set for a Peter Jackson or Alfred Hitchcock psychological horror movie.
I decided to save money getting here by taking the bus down from the Pioneer Valley, and also because there was only one train going southbound on a Saturday instead of the usual 4-6 that run. For a little while it seemed like it was going to be "best laid plans go awry" when I stayed two hours longer than originally planned and then Keith and I had to drive/travel fast over to catch the bus in Northampton due to other pressures that arose -- but the connections were made. The Springfield bus terminal always creeps me out and today was no exception to that, with an added strange coda when the bus drove in the lowest of an imposing series of triple-ramps for I-91 south and then through a storage yard (?) to actually get on the interstate. And since it was a bus, there were a series of random characters on and off it. First, in Northampton, an elegantly dressed woman took the liberty of offering me a free cigarette as I stood outside about to make a cellphone call, and giving no indication that I was actually a smoker (I'm not.) Then, in Springfield, a woman boarded the bus with a bizzare talking baby doll in her hands, which she kept telling to "be quiet" -- seeming to momentarily forget that she had a doll, not a real child, and then she turned it off. Later, after New Haven, several girls had lengthy cellphone conversations on the bus, oblivious to the fact that every word they said could be heard by an audience of 55. Finally, in Manhattan itself, the bus stalled in Saturday night traffic snaking down towards the Port Authority, and two people who were sitting near me switched seats into someone's spot who'd stepped up to go to the bathroom, and then they quickly, and sheepishly, realized they needed to return back to their rightful spots.
I went right to the subway stop at Port Authority to find a long line for the one automated-vendor accepting bills. The guy two people in front of me couldn't figure out how to buy a single ticket, and I wondered why the woman behind him and in front of me was thinking that you had to do that with a metro card. I soon understood when she produced $80 in cash from her pocket to buy a card for a month's worth of travel right there on the spot. Meanwhile I settled for the "bargain" 6 fares for the price of 5 @ $10 and found the N train heading north to Astoria. Manhattan glistened in the clear sky as the train huffed and jerked along the elevated tracks, and I look forward to experiencing some holiday spirit tomorrow.
