The awesome adventures of Jack Chi: New York Trip (October 11th-14th)

This past long weekend I went to New York! It was a school trip with my friend Kate's school. They had extra space on the bus, so a bunch of the language monitors went. Overall it was an ok trip, not great just ok. But it did allow me to find out what type of travelling I don't like to do - big groups!

So a little bit of background. This trip is organized by my friend Kate's school. There was only one bus for the trip and about 30 people came. About 1/2 are students while the rest are language monitors or teacher chaperons. When I imagined the trip I thought it was going to be my friends and I splitting off from the main group and doing our own thing, but due to lack of planning or leadership, we kind of just tagged along for the ride for most of the trip and that caused a lot of wasted times.

So on Friday we all hopped on the bus on Levis side, me Kelly, Kate, Maryse and Lynn. After a long 10 hour drive we finally arrived in New York city on Saturday morning at 9am. We were dropped off in Manhattan while the driver took our stuff to our hotel which was all the way in New Jersey (off to a bad start). So we checked out the bull of wall street, china town and some other stuff. But because it was with the big group of people it was a lot of "oh look at this famous thing", [take some pictures], off to next destination. I realized quickly I hated this type of travelling. Around 10:30 we were picked up by our bus driver again and dropped off back at our hotel in Jersey about 1 hour away. So we didn't really get to experience NYC at night at all.

I tried to broach the subject of splitting up from the main group with my friends but everyone seems pretty intent on sticking with the group simply because it was easy. Perhaps they were also scared to get lost in the big city. Back in our hotel room, the fire alarm was pulled and we had to go outside at 1am when everyone was just getting into deep sleep. Some not so nice words were said about what we would do to the person who did this - mostly by me. (At least the Francophone kids will get a real taste of Anglophone swearing, hows that for a cultural lesson).

The second day in NYC was better, we checked out this really massive cathedral and amazing sculpture, Grand Central Station, Times Square and met J-roc. J-roc is a janitor who works at the Marriot just by Times Square. We were up on the 8th floor lounge admiring the view and I took a little look around on the upper floors. As I was taking pictures three janitors came around and asked if I was the guy. Thinking they were just messing with me I decided to play along. J-roc took me to this room and started to explain some painting lols. Anyways, sensing an opportunity I asked if they had access to all the rooms in the hotel. They said yes only if I bring girls. Haha why not. A gentlemen's agreement was made and my friend Maryse, Kelly and I got access to the upper floors of the hotel and a decent view of Times Squre. Pimping out my friends ftw!

At night time I broke off from the main group with my friend Kelly and we checked out NBC studios and found an amazing sky line. And we all randomly camp upon a movie shooting. Apparently it was for the new spider man.

The last day or what I think was the last day, since I am now writing from memory I checked out Central Park on a bike by myself cause I am a bad-ass like that. It was cool but I think the park in HK was way cooler in it's architecture. But the bike part was definitely a good idea, since it was such a huge park. We also went to Chelsea market where I splurged on a boiled lobster - it was amazing! And finally we took a ferry to Staten Island and saw the skyline of Manhattan again along with the Statue of Liberty.

Kelly getting her hair caught in things.

Spiderman movie shooting

Really cool sculpture of Good vs Evil.

The 3 people behind were sarging, the guy in the monkey mask tried a pick up line on Kelly lols: "Are you Jamaican? Cause you are Jamaican me crazy!" I told him a better one was: "Nice shoes, lets fuck." Proceeded to get a high five, like a boss.