Yay!! So last night I finally got back from my trip to New York at around 9-ish I think...I don't know whether I should be sad because now I won't be able to walk right across the street for instant chinese food or happy that I can finally sleep in my own bed...

WARNING: THIS JOURNAL ENTRY CONTAINS A LOT OF RANTING AND BORING TOPICS. CONTINUE ONLY IF YOU WANT THE NEXT FEW MINUTES OF YOUR LIFE WASTED


Okay, so our family friend who lives up in New York recommended this hotel for us to stay at in this massive asian/chinese invested city (at least I think it's a city) called Flushing. This is the same guy whom about 8 years ago recommended this "5 star hotel" but actually turned out to be this crappy motel on top of a store and had cockroaches raining down from the ceiling. But this time, the place he recommended was actually pretty decent. Except for the fact that the rooms were TINY and two people couldn't walk side by side at the same time. and the air conditioning only had two functions--high and high. the noise was fun trying to sleep to >___> But basically, living in Flushing felt like living in China. Even Chinatown seemed less chinese-ish than that place. Most of the people there didn't even know how to speak English, which I find really irritating because even though I'm pretty fluent in Chinese, THIS IS AMERICA. The hotel workers couldn't even understand simple phrases like, "excuse me, where can I put this" (which is what my brother asked this one worker and received a blank stare in response)

But, aside from linguistic issues in Flushing, NEW YORK WAS AWESOME! We took this tour of downtown and uptown New York and even though it rained for the two days we were on the tour, it kept the weather nice and cool. and SHOPPING. OMG SHOPPING. I bought so much crap that I'm pretty sure I'm broke right now. let's see...I gots myself jewerly, clothes, pointless souvenirs, bootleg movies and cds (I'm so bad) and other things that I can't really remember. One really cool thing I saw was this fire juggling lady doing a demonstration in from the Ripley's believe it or not museum. I only got to see the last few seconds of the show but still, it was pretty awesome.

But the only bad thing about my trip was the one thing I was looking forward to the most. Have you guys heard of a store called Forbidden Planet? It's even mentioned in the book City of Bones (which was how I found out about the place). Apparently according to search results on Google, that place was supposed to be "Otaku heaven." I even looked up pictures and it seemed like a pretty cool place. WELL GUESS WHAT. I HAD NEVER FELT MORE DISAPPOINTED IN MY LIFE. (sorry for those of you who go there often...) First of all, that place wasn't air conditioned very well. I remember I felt like I was suffocating from the humidity after only 10 minutes. One thing I noticed when I first walked into that store was the huge amount of comics and action figures there were. I thought to myself, "oh wow. just think of all the anime and manga stuff they must have." The anime and manga stuff were on the top floor (acutally it was actually more of a small room than a floor)and I was expecting something grand and worthy of the title "otaku heaven" but all it was were a few bookshelves of manga, some shelves of dvds and a few micellaneous keychains and bags.
-_____- HUGE LET DOWN. I was hoping to spend most of my money there but all I ended up buying was Kitchen Princess vol. 9 because I felt bad for wandering around the tiny place and using up what little oxygen they had for about 40 minutes. It was an extremely anticlimactic experience.

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Anyways...no one would probably want to hear more of my compaining, so here's the annoucement I'm making: Marchingband season is starting and since I'm a section leader, I have to stay longer than the 8 hours of practice a day, which means less time on the computer which equals no new pics for a while BUT HAVE NO FEAR because I may end up doodling something to signify I haven't forgotten about you guys ^_^