My first weekend in NYC

Weekend 1:

Thursday night- Not bad that Thursday is classified as part of the weekend considering I had been in NYC less than a week. I moved down the weekend before with my parents, me and as much of my shit as I could stuff into the SUV rental that I could manage. Hung-over as hell, which was an appropriate exit from Syracuse, introduction to New York and pretty much my life story for the past year.

It's the first day of my internship at a prestigious modern art museum in the city. I'm wildly overdressed, as I know I have a date that night. A date already?! Pre-arranged with an ibanker I had met in a Baltic European country, traveling last summer. How exotic. A huge tool, but likeable and I found myself strangely drawn to him. Safe, maybe, and the paycheck doesn't hurt, let's not dance around this one. So we hooked up, stayed in touch and once I had determined that I had not freaked him out too badly by announcing via text a couple months before that I was moving to New York, he said he wanted to take me out to dinner. Which brings me trucking around Chelsea, in heels and in the wrong direction, cursing my life and the cold. I finally arrived at Buddakhan roughly 20 minutes late, which also sets the tone so far for my time in New York. But it was all up-hill from there. Good (but overpriced food) and this fool actually looks real good in a suit. My goal of fancy date has been accomplished week 1 in New York. (I texted this to my friend I had left behind in Upstate NY on the subway the next morning at roughly 8AM).

Friday night- My first weekend night out. Much more expensive than the previous night but also a bit rowdier. I invited my fabulous gay friend to be my date to a museum event, as my date from the night before was out of town. The point in this museum internship-sponsored event was a get-to-know-your-fellow-interns but of course GF and I had nothing to do with that. We spent the whole evening catching up, while sipping wine and then trying unsuccessfully to bring it with us to view the museum exhibits. By the time we finished that everyone had left, so we decided to head out and have our night really begin. Now to put this in context, this is a friend whom I had studied abroad with in college and gone out to many a house club with—we love that shit. So that was our goal for the night-dance our asses to some house music. I had read about a party in the upper west side which was to be our final destination. First we decided for some reason unbeknownst to me to head to a bar in the East Village. Boring. We stayed for a drink and decided we were hungry as shit. We wandered and found some pizza. Not a good decision, as was GF ordering the ravioli pizza and myself deciding I wanted some fruit punch for my beverage. GF's pizza tasted like Chef Boyardee and my juice literally tasted like a pixie stick. We ate all of it. Then cab for our awesome destination. We took the escalator up to what seemed like should be an awesome, down and dirty electronic music club. False. A ritzy yet awesome hotel bar with logs and ridic décor. The music wasn't bad either. We stopped by the bar (no Stoli, which is my drink of choice) and that's when I made the fatal decision that we were going to be drinking grey goose for the rest of the night. Needless to say, we gave up on finding our original place (even after being huffed at by the snooty cocktail waitress) as the music was pretty good here. We danced and next thing I knew GF was shoving me in a cab barking instructions for Astoria. I ended the night proud of myself for not yelling back at the nasty cab driver, broke, drunk and with a smile on my face.

Saturday night- My first couple weeks in NYC I harassed everyone I knew (even just a little bit) that lived here to hang out with me. I won't lie, I still do it when necessary. So this particular night I decided to call up my old elementary and high school friend MM. We hadn’t spoken in quite a bit but I did run into her when we were home for Christmas so I decided it wasn't too creeptastic to call her. Good choice. Of course she wanted to hang out that night. So after taking the wrong train, I arrived a half hour late in the East Village to meet her at her friend's birthday dinner. I was definitely her excuse to leave, but I had no problems with it since I wanted to get the hell out of there too. We went to a bar up the street for a drink (which turned into multiple) and to catch up. We did indeed and decided to head back to Williamsburg, where she lives and is apparently the mayor. We entered her favorite bar and—bearded men everywhere. And every time I turned around MM was hugging one of them. I almost jumped in surprise when a particularly burly one approached us at the bar. “Oh that's my exboyfriend”, MM explained. THAT is the guy she had been whining about this whole time? I took another slug of my (free) drink. That's where the night becomes a blur, though I know we drank entirely too much free liquor, danced like idiots at the Cove and ended the night having a deep discussion about our Polish background over kebobs. Which as a sidenote, are nothing like the doner kebobs I had come to expect from studying in Germany for 6 months. Doners are a delicious treat—kebob meat, FRENCH FRIES, vegs and curry or tzatiki sauce all mixed together in what resembles a Chinese takeout box. Amazing. Williamsburg kebob-failure. Also sober and not hungover in Williamsburg-failure. I didn't leave her apartment until 5:00 the next day, after we spent the day laying like corpses around her apartment, watching Jersey Shore and attempting to eat pizza. I almost gave my roommate a heart attack as well, since my first weekend in NYC I only came home for one of the nights. Pattern....