Weekend Getaways: NYC with Tom Greene

By Tom Greene

Poultney has very little to do on weekends and gas is very expensive. These facts are very real to students living on the Green Mountain College campus. Because of this, whenever there is an opportunity to get off of the GMC campus and travel to places which don't have the crippling utter ennui of a Green Mountain College weekend when you don't have any specific plans (plans that usually have to require leaving GMC's campus anyway), you have to take that opportunity.

For that very reason I jumped at the chance to get onboard the GMC shuttle, destination New York City, for the weekend. The trip allowed me to fulfill two distinct goals (getting off campus to do something, and getting to do said thing without wasting precious expensive gas).

My aspirations for this trip were fairly simple, While my fellow schoolmates were making plans to go to museums, visit Central Park, or try on stuff at Tiffany's, my mission: Make my way to Chinatown and search out a copy of the series Maburaho (an anime series from last year that I wanted to add to my arsenal but was not available on eBay or at my regular buying website).

The mission seemed fairly doable- how hard can it be to find one series in the deluge that is New York City? It's a city of millions of people and a large amount of area- why, I should be able to find TWO copies of the series in the city! As a result, I focused myself as the shuttle entertainment began: Wayne's World (which I liked enough to bring) and Cool Runnings (which I stomached enough to not fall asleep through).

At around 12 we hit the heart of Times Square and my mission began. It took roughly five minutes for the first strike to the money I had brought with me (the result of a mixture of a work check from spring break, lottery winnings shared by my parents, and my tax refund checks coming in) in the form of a cheap street vendor watch, a necessary evil considering the warning that if we didn't come back by 10 p.m, we would turn into a pumpkin...or be left there, either way.

New York is a great place, filled with all sorts of shiny things to keep a person happily distracted. After a few hours of slacking off, soaking up Broadway, and people watching my second expenditure arose in the form of buying some movies on the street (Be Cool and Sideways, the former which I was told sucked following this, the latter my therapist at home said was great) and a large amount of Korean market-bought soft drinks, juices, and canned milk coffees (in the theory I would be thirsty enough to drink all of them- a theory that proved false.)

Quick question: Why do they call them Broadway plays if there are no theaters on Broadway itself?

I proceeded to walk more, following the road down to Union Square, before splurging on a subway ticket to my target destination, Chinatown- the theoretical fansubbed anime capital of New York. I say theoretical because finding a store that sells Hong Kong fansubbed anime there is roughly on par with finding a needle in a haystack.

This leads to the problems for how hard it can get to- I mean, you would expect there to be more in the area, wouldn't you? I proceeded to spend most of the time searching around this area, finally finding one place. Within five minutes of searching, I found the series I was looking for, plus two others I wanted for a little while (Raxephon as well for a relatively low price).

Thought: When you have very small goals, it takes very little to satisfy you- but it also leads to WAY too much downtime.

It was this amount of downtime, combined with how late it was getting (around 5 p.m. at the time) that led me to begin to make the walk from Chinatown back to Times Square. This seemed easier on paper, having seen that Broadway went all the way through there. However, this was before I knew how long Broadway exactly was. In that aspect, I spent the better part of the next four hours walking back, spending most of the time on that exact road. I gave thanks that it happened to be one of the first nice days of the year, and was able to walk comfortably from this area. Following some minor things to cut through the time (mostly heading to a Barnes and Noble and reading some books to cut a good portion out).

I made it back in time to satisfy the hunger that had made its way to the rest of my body. It was this time period when it is important to use the area. New York is home to many of the nation's finest restaurants. I couldn't afford them. It is also home to some of the world's most respected deli fare. I couldn't afford that. No, I was left having to go to Quizno's and get some cheap $2.99 fare for my late lunch and later dinner, washed down with one of the still-in-level drinks I had bought.

Eventually, I managed to get to Times Square with my bag weighing me down and ankles felt like they were going to fall off.

It got to the point when the pain was so hard to deal with that I willingly allowed myself to be lectured to by members of the Church of Scientology just to have a place to sit down for a short period.

I got there at about 9, leading me to have roughly one hour of nothing to do in order to find stuff to kill time for the next hour. Luckily, Times Square is a fine place to kill time. On the way back, it seemed to be much more...boring. Everyone else fell asleep rather quickly, leaving me awake and alone, partly due to insomnia, partly due to the pain.

Final tally:

Two ankles and one shoulder killing me
One shift of work missed due to
21 hours up consecutively.
Basically done for: 3 anime series.
Someone would tell me if I had a problem with anime, right?