A long report of our short trip to NYC

My parents are visiting us this summer and we decided to take them on a trip to New York City. By many accounts, this is the most iconic city in the US, and if you are a first time visitor to the east coast, as my father is, it is a common ritual to include NYC in your itinerary. I had taken a Thursday and Friday off, and almost on a whim, we chose to use that time to do a whirlwind tour, to take the teeniest bite of the Big Apple. 

There was much hemming and hawing on the best way to get there. We had three options: 1) Drive to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and take a cab across the George Washington bridge into NYC 2) Take an Amtrak from Boston to Penn Station 3) Drive to Stamford, Connecticut, check into a hotel, and take a train to NYC. We settled on #3, having done that in the past. #2 would have been our preferred choice but the Amtrak train tickets were going to cost us around $1200,  round-trip for five people.

So on Thursday morning, we set off on our big adventure. Per family tradition, we started two hours later than we’d planned, around 1 PM. It would have been a three and a half hour drive if I had driven straight from Burlington to Stamford, but we made two stops to stretch our legs. The first stop was at a Shaws parking lot at Sturbridge, about an hour from home, near the Connecticut border. The next was at a Whole Foods in the Blue Back shopping area in West Hartford, CT, where we picked up some pizza slices and ate them inside the store, in a little seating area beyond the billing counters.

News channels have been hyperventilating about a food-borne illness that has been going around from a microscopic parasite called Cyclospora. Some people are calling this illness ‘butt COVID’, an apt name as it causes low grade fever and explosive diarrhea. Its primary vehicle for transmission is fresh produce, especially lettuce, so Su had strict instructions for us to avoid raw vegetables or fruit of any kind. Sandwiches with suspect greens were out of the question at Whole Foods. The safest thing seemed to be their pizza, specially charred so you can know what elemental carbon tastes like. They were actually okay, chewier than I had wanted, but a small price to pay to avoid toilet armageddon.

We finally made it to Stamford at 6.30 PM. We checked in to a Marriott near the train station, which while nice overall, had a rundown feel, like it has seen better days. This is the same Marriott that we had stayed at, back in December of 2024, when we did our previous trip to NYC. We got rooms on the 14th floor this time. The view was nice. The curtains parted on the window wall, from our high vantage point, the urban landscape of Stamford looked like a board game with miniature animatronic pieces: toy trains arriving at the station, toy cars going up and down the dark grey asphalt of roads on both sides of the hotel. That night, we ordered Panera sandwiches and soups for dinner and I picked up a couple of vodka Martinis for myself and Baba from the bar in the hotel lobby. I must be a lightweight for Martinis because that one Martini knocked me out, and when I woke up the next morning, my head felt heavy, almost like a hangover.

As part of our room package, we were entitled to complimentary breakfast for four. Ma declined hers because 8 AM was too early for her to have breakfast. Su, Baba, and I ordered the same thing: omelette with spinach and feta cheese. Our server was a funny hispanic lady. “Which one of you ordered the omelette?,” she asked, brows furrowed, carrying a tray of three omelettes made exactly the same way. The omelettes were good; rich, fluffed with cheese, and came with a side of roasted potatoes. There was also, for garnish, half a strawberry and a small slice of orange. Sia dutifully made me quarantine those pieces of raw fruit and the errant potatoes touching them to an isolated part of the plate. She herself had ordered waffles, and true to form, left her plate half uneaten. 

Around 9.15 AM, we left for NYC. We parked at the Metro garage, next to the Stamford train station and took the New Haven line to the Grand Central terminal. The hard part before boarding was deciding whether to take the earliest next train or put some buffer in between, because we didn’t know how far the tracks were and we’d have to find elevators or escalators because Ma has trouble with stairs. After we settled on the right departure time and got to the tracks, everything went smoothly. Being a Friday and off-peak hours, there weren’t too many people and the ride was comfortable. 

An hour later we were at Grand Central. The Grand Central terminal is a breathtaking piece of architecture. Its vaulted ceiling is more than a hundred feet high and emblazoned on its sea-green background are white glyphs that tell a story. I caught a winged horse on one portion of the ceiling and a bearded warrior with a club on another. What the full story is I don’t know, because you will need a wrestler’s neck to look up long enough to connect the images and truly take in the panoramic view. My neck wasn’t up to the task, having spent most of its life resting on a cushion or doing easy work holding up my head.

Right outside the terminal, we met touts setting tourist traps. We made a deliberate choice to fall prey to one of them - a HOHO (hop-on hop-off) bus that could complete a loop of downtown Manhattan in about two hours. While the tout was talking to us, a homeless person made off with the drink she had left on a pylon nearby. She saw him from the corner of her eye and tried to get one of her colleagues to stop him, but the thief was too fast. He smiled at us, and with caffeinated loot in hand, turned around and melted into the crowd. The lady didn’t seem to mind. “What can you do? It happens sometimes” she said laughing. I wish this incident had happened in a part of NYC called SoHo. Then I could have made this rhyme work: The hobo took the cocoa from a HoHo seller at SoHo.

The HOHO bus was a double-decker. We sat in the lower level because the top level, open to the skies on a beautiful day, was full. We can now describe to you what the ground floor of the Empire State Building looks like, from the outside: it is big and it has windows. After a few stops, as people started to get off, Sia, Su, and I made our way to the top. The view was expectedly far better and as we passed through SoHo, Canal Street, and New York City Hall, we were able to better gawp at the majestic buildings, which somehow looked both vintage and modern.

Our driver, a black gentleman, was having a bad day at work. From overhearing him talking to someone on the phone, I gathered that this wasn’t the usual bus he drove. The seat wouldn’t go back, and being a tall dude he couldn’t get comfortable. Traffic was bad and his patience was wearing thin, both with his passengers and other drivers on the road. Every so often, someone blocked his way or tried to cut into his lane causing him to honk the horn and loudly inquire ‘just what the f*** do you think you’re doing, mother*****?’. It was also getting hot as the day wore on. He had a little picnic bag and would occasionally extract from it a bottle of juice, pour its contents into a thermos, and then fill the thermos with ice from an ice cooler. At one stop, after some passengers had deboarded, he spilled juice all over himself and then while attempting to clean himself in panic, dropped the cap of his thermos into the dirty street outside. We decided to get off at the Port Authority stop, which put us within walking distance of Times Square. At this point, our driver had had enough. He made another call, presumably to his boss, and said that he couldn’t do it anymore. His legs were cramping and he had been driving since early morning. “That’s it folks, this bus ain’t goin’ further no more,” he told the rest of the passengers. I wish him better days.

Stepping into the street, we were welcomed by a gentle breeze and we immediately felt lighter. It was now lunchtime. NYC is awash with restaurants. There are so many on every street and corner, that it is possible to spend too much time trying to optimize from the plethora of choices. I had originally planned that we should go to Los Tacos, which was very favorably reviewed on the Internet. However, everyone was hungry and we decided to go into the first place we saw that had indoor seating and a bathroom. This happened to be Emperor Dumpling. We ordered pork and chicken dumplings, spring rolls, fried rice, and lemonades. The food was adequate, meh, as the kids say, but we were thankful for being able to cool ourselves in the airconditioning and use a clean bathroom.

On to Times Square next. This was a short walk from Emperor Dumpling. We passed by Los Tacos where there was a long queue, with, inexplicably, armed police standing by. New Yorkers must really hate people cutting the line. We ran into a philosophical question as we reached what we thought was Times Square: what exactly is Times Square? Where does it start? Where does it end? Is it just a state of mind? All of us had this blurry image of giant animated billboards, planted in our minds by Hollywood, with one billboard in particular that, for some reason, displayed stock prices. We think we found that spot but we’re not a hundred percent sure. There were many streets with many giant billboards in that area, but none of them looked exactly like the emblematic one we had in our minds.

We walked around some more, admiring the buildings in the Theatre District, and soaking in the atmosphere, the crowds, the bodegas, the people dressed in superhero costumes who’d charge you for a selfie, the fashionably wealthy with their lattes, honest panhandlers who carried signboards that read ‘Need money for weed and hoes’. These are common tropes of big city life and you will find them in other places around the world. But New York City is patient zero. Once you’ve experienced them in New York City, the same scenes feel like imitations in other cities.

We had also planned to go to Madame Tussauds but it was now late afternoon and we wanted to catch the train back to Stamford while it was still off peak hours. We booked an UberXL back to Grand Central. Our Uber driver turned out to be a cheerful Nepali man. He had a lot to say, and wanted to cover as many topics as possible in the short ride from Times Square to Grand Central. A recurring theme ran through all his topics: ‘Rules are meant for small people, not big people’, he kept telling us. “You see the bus lanes?” he asked, pointing to a lane close to the sidewalk painted red. “I am not allowed to drive through them. But the buses? They can do as they like. They can drive through their lanes, they can drive through my lanes, cut in front of me. Do whatever they like. You know why? Because they’re big and my car is small.” As we were passing some trees, he asked me: “What do you call a tree in Hindi?” Thinking the talk was going to turn botanical, I replied ‘ped’. “If you plant a small ped next to a big ped, it dies, did you know that?” he said. 

We took the train back to Stamford, arriving around 5 PM, and began our drive back home. The drive wasn’t long by American standards, but a majority of my passengers were, for varied reasons, unfavorably disposed towards the car ride. Baba and Su were susceptible to motion sickness. Sia wanted nothing more than to get home and shut herself in her room. Ma had banged her knee on a pillar in NYC, and wanted to stretch her legs. Traffic was bad getting out of Stamford. Google Maps kept rerouting me as it found faster routes. This turned out to be a blessing, because many of those routes took us off the highway and through quaint little towns where we could admire beautiful houses and their manicured gardens. We made a quick stop at the Whole Foods in West Hartford again, this time to have dinner (pizza again).

The second leg of the journey then went quicker. To pass the time, we played a word game. A person would start by naming a country, and then the next person would use the last letter of the country’s name to name a different country. For example, if one said ‘Germany’, the next person would say ‘Yemen’ or any country whose name starts with ‘Y’, and so on. We soon loosened the rules to include city names, and then any bounded region, as our knowledge of geography started to run out. In the end, we gave up on this altogether and the game became: ‘say a factoid, any factoid’. My contribution was that Curacao is a type of liqueur that gives cocktails their blue color.

We finally reached home at 10 PM. All in all, it wasn’t a bad trip. In hindsight, we should have given NYC a day more. I would have liked for my parents to have seen the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. Will I make another trip to cover these places? No way. Fuhgeddaboudit.