Day Twenty Five – The New York Mile

June 28th; We had no chance to sleep in after our reasonably huge day. Check out times can suck. But, as I say, no rest for the wicked. We headed out of the Chelsea Star Hotel and set off towards the one I had booked the night before. Thinking ahead, that’s called.

We arrived at about noon. ‘Check in doesn’t start until four.’ Bastard! What were we going to do? ‘Is there somewhere we can put our bags?’ I asked.
‘Downstairs. Locker room.’
Where the hell are the stairs, I wonder. We stood in front of the elevator for about three minutes. The button didn’t light up. It went from the top floor to the bottom. Then it got to ours. We got in. It started taking us to the top floor. We got off. We got on when it was coming down. I’d figured out the stupid elevator. It goes from top to bottom. Bottom to top. It doesn’t stop unless a button is pressed, in which case it keeps doing it’s thing until it gets to that floor. It also has a tendency to shudder and open it’s door a little bit when it goes past a floor it’s not stopping at.

The lockers are stupid too. You find an empty one, put in the number to this machine and feed money into it. Then it decides if it likes you or some other metaphysical crap, tosses a pair of dice and makes the call of whether it will close there and then or let you put things in. Ben got five dollars taken. His stuff fit in my locker though, once I’d figured it out. You could only re-access the things once before you had to pay again. Some other nutcase was swearing and hitting the paystation he was trying to figure out. We went for a walk. There was a cinema nearby which we remembered from our last hostel. By nearby I mean twenty something blocks and a couple of avenues over.

Nevermind that, we had at least four hours to kill! We took the long strides to the cinema. I wanted to see Narnia but it wasn’t on that day. We saw Wanted instead, that one with Angelina Jolie about bending bullets. It was pretty good. The Boys, as usual, were awestruck and yelling. There were a lot of kids in the Cinema. I got ID’ed when I bought my ticket. God knows why their Mum brought them into that. I think I saw them leave for a minute and come back in just as the guy shot some other guy in the head and then put his gun through the hole and started shooting. I’m glad I got asked for my ID. I guess some people are just shit parents.

We left the movie and headed home. I looked in a games store for the first time I’d been over here really. I left with my first and last purchase of reasonable size. I got a PSP and some games to keep my company on those lonely nights. They’re about half the price here than they are at home. Enough to make it worth it. We walked back to the hostel and checked in. There was a bit of a queue.

After that I gathered up my washing. I was getting mine out and Ben was doing his and we were talking about it for a good five minutes. As I was about to walk out the door, Ryan asks ‘Hey, do you guys need to do any washing before we go to London.’ WHAT THE HELL! Come on guy! We all headed outside, hoping to find a Chinese Laundry. This brings me to my measures of New York. They are the most accurate ways of measuring distance and time.

One New York Mile equals roughly one Starbucks.
‘How far away are you?’
‘About four Starbucks.’
‘Oh, I see you. Ciao.’
That’s how it goes. Brilliant, right? Depending on what part of town you are can also use the New York Half Mile. Usually in the Upper West Side you’d be going off Chinese Laundries or Corner-Delis, but not both at once. They occur about twice as often as Starbucks, surprisingly.

Turns out that my beloved Wash-Dry-Folds are closed on Sundays, so we wouldn’t be able to pick them up until Monday. Considering we have to be at the airport at around six o’clock on Monday, I thought that to be a poor idea. Coin-op it was. The struggle for quarters begins. I put all my stuff in together. I took no heed for colours or whites or warm or cold washes. Everything went in. Twenty five minutes later, it came out. Hendo and I had enough quarters for one drier. We put them all in together. Luckily his socks are all white and mine are black. And thank you Mum, for talking me into putting a J on the label of all my underwear. I hate to think what vile things might happen were I to put Hendo’s on.

We punctuated our time in the washing room by coming down to the common room and playing Jenga really loudly. It was wicked. Hendo and I had a few epic battles where the tower ended up twice as high as it started, wobbling like Hendo’s belly on a treadmill. We played Would You Rather for a little bit. It was a terribly tame version though. I did one question particularly boggling and somewhat out of character for the game which asked whether I would want to write ‘idiot’ ten times or drink a thickshake.

‘Would you rather take on a wild, enraged, terrifying grizzly bear with a good sword OR a blow torch?’ I was stumped. Just stumped. Of course the boys were coming up with their own rather gruesome questions. It rather puzzled a couple of girls who walked up to ask what game we were playing. They’d heard Ben and Hendo yell something about left testicles and eyes, so when they picked up a card and were asked whether they’d want to write idiot or drink a thickshake, they too were stumped.

An old man fell asleep on the ground in the common room. He looked a bit like he’d had a sudden heart attack once he’d settled down. Clutching his chest, mouth open, foot occasionally twitching. Ryan made a grave-cross out of magazine pages and put it behind him. People were taking pictures all night. I was the only one around when he woke up. It took a while to get off the ground. He looked around, confused, and headed off upstairs.

There are all sorts of things in this hostel which don’t quite work right. The elevator is one of them. I also noticed that on the fourth floor the down button has an up-facing arrow. It confused me for a moment. The hand-drier in the bathroom sounds like it’s about to spring a gear or something. It’s like one of the old crank-shaft cars. I’m afraid its propeller will start up and it will start taxiing down the runway.

The vending machine did not like any of my notes. I put in a one and it rejected it. I put a five in and it rejected it. I tried the one next to it. It gave me the complete cold-shoulder! It didn’t even try and eat the money! It just stood there, inactive and inanimate, mocking me. What a bastard. The quarter machine doesn’t give quarters. My bed works though. Sleep.