I promised quite a few people that I would keep them updated throughout this New York adventure so people better be reading this! First of all, today was my birthday, so Chase made me breakfast, and I left for the day with the other girls that go to my internship. For purposes of not getting into any trouble, I won't mention any specifics about my internship just in case.
Anyway, I take the 1 train to the shuttle, and then walk to my internship. It takes about 40 minutes to get there, but it really isn't too bad. The Metro pass was so worth every 104 dollars. Even as painful as it was to fork out that money.
So far every day we've gotten lunch at some awesome places. On our first day we went to the Shake Shack of course. I was a first timer and extremely pleased with the outcome. The second day we went to Chipotle since it is pretty much right across the street. We have that in Utah so that's nothing exciting but that might become a weekly standard. Today we went to this somewhat obscure health food place, which conveniently didn't put prices on the wall menus. Twelve dollars later I had a Rosemary turkey, brown rice, quinoa, spinach and guacamole bowl. Gosh this place is expensive.
Now it's time to tell you all about our first dangerous NY experience. It was, conveniently, Chase's first time ever on the subway. We were with a fairly big group of interns when a loud black man walked on the train and shouted that he was handicap and needed to sit down. A kind girl stood up to let him sit, which he did in a way that did not look handicap at all, so the girls sitting across from him, a girls softball team, decided to comment on it. He then declared that he would give $5 to whoever gave him his seat, to which the girl said it wasn't necessary. That should be the end of the story, right? But this guy was apparently "on" something because he could not leave it at that. One of the girls on the softball team then took off her hood under which was her natural hair. He then started commenting on how he loved her hair and how pretty she was, and not exactly in a respectful manner. This girl, to put it nicely, had lots of personality and spunk. (She was the one commenting on him not being handicapped.) She replied that she was a lesbian and that she didn't like men, and he responded by calling her a very rude name. Then her friend started to stick up for her and it turned into a loud and heated argument. It was seriously amazing how quickly everyone that was near them moved to the other side of the train. It was like they had seen this situation before.... I was getting super nervous but we were far enough away that we didn't really need to move any further, and I started squeezing Chase's hand pretty hard. Two guys were sitting near this, and both of them had metal softball bats. Later we found out that they were the coaches for the girls' softball team. One of them, a skinny white guy with stringy hair got up and tried to calm down the black guy and stand in front of the softball team. I'm not sure what was said, but the black guy did not like it. He actually started yelling and shoving the white guy, who was just trying to protect his team. As the black guy started swinging at the white guy, the white guy was just taking it, not reacting or hitting him back, which is saying something since he was holding a metal bat. The tension in the train car was so intense.
After what seemed like forever, everyone was yelling at the black guy to get off the train, and finally it stopped and the doors opened so he walked out, still yelling back and forth with the black girl, who was unintentionally egging him on the entire time. He passed by the door that was closer to us and and started turning around to keep yelling. Chase didn't want him to get back on the train and there was only women standing by that door so he got up to make sure he didn't get back on. The black guy then started yelling at everyone who was blocking him and spit at Chase, but missed and hit some lady next to him. During all this time the conductor kept the doors open and didn't move the train! Duh! Close the doors! I was terrified that he was going to go after Chase but luckily he didn't and the train finally moved. I was shaken up after all of this. Chase made everyone laugh by commenting that this was the first time he'd ever ridden on the subway. Thankfully what could've been a dangerous situation become something we could all laugh about. Ok, nervously laugh about.
