New York City is a place full of history, tradition, and character. I had the privilege of traveling there for a few days over Spring Break, and although the sheer size of the city is enough to overwhelm many people, I saw no need to worry. I felt prepared for the New York experience because it is one of the most popular settings in the movies.

On a tight budget with very little time, I sought to see as much of the city as possible and soak up the “New York Experience.” I arrived on Monday, March 26, at approximately 7:00pm. After taking a shuttle to my hotel room, I went out for dinner before going to bed. I had a long day planned, and I wanted to get to sleep early knowing that my chances of uninterrupted sleep were slim to none since I was staying in a hostel.

      The cost of food has to be factored in on any trip, but New York is a very cheap city to eat in as long as you’re content with living on pizza and hot dogs like I was. After two slices of pizza, I went back to my room and passed out. The next day went as follows:

7:00am – Rise, clean up, and mingle with roommates. The only other two that were awake are a young Canadian lady named Sarah (currently living in England) and a middle-aged Danish lady named Anna. We talk about our plans for the day, and it turns out that all three of us plan on going to the Staten Island Ferry to get a look at various sites (Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, etc). Sarah plans on walking downtown to the financial district and spending the entire day there. I mention that I’m taking the bus because I don’t feel like walking through an area where most of the people “judge others by the size of their wallets,” quoting Martin Sheen from Wall Street.

7:23am – Walk into a shop around the corner and buy an orange juice. However, I have an ulterior motive. I want change in ones so that I can ride the bus. I hand the man a 20 and asked for eight ones and a ten for change.

“Sure, Chief”, he replies.

I immediately pick up on the fact that I’m the “Chief” because in Spiderman, Tobey Maguire uses the local NY lingo before he goes back into a burning building.

7:28am – I stop on Park Ave. to wait for the #1 bus

7:30am – I get tired of waiting and decide to start walking south to the next bus stop

7:31am - #1 Bus passes me heading south on Park Ave. I decide to just walk the entire way to the Staten Island Ferry

8:22am – I get tired of walking and wait for a bus

8:28am – I board the #1 and look for a place to insert my one dollar bills like they have on the Corvallis Transit System. The bus driver tells me “coins only.” I consider going into the Bruce Willis character from Die Hard With a Vengeance and insist that the bus take me non-stop to the ferry, but I’m not a badass in a bloody wifebeater bur rather a punk with a college t-shirt on

8:32am – I walk into a Chase Bank (there’s one on every corner) to get some $6 in quarters

8:46am – I step onto the Staten Island Ferry and take a seat on the outside deck with some Canadian tourists. As we all admire the view of Ellis Island and Lady Liberty, I remark that, “It’s no wonder Melanie Griffith was such a hard working girl. Taking this ferry every morning would be a good start to any day.”

“Is this the ferry she took?” asks one of the Canadian gals.

“Actually, I’m not really sure,” I reply

9:23am – Returning to Manhattan after the ferry turned around, I begin to walk towards the Brooklyn Bridge with the full intention of walking all the way across. Then, I come to my senses and realize that if I walk all the way across I will be in Brooklyn and out of the safe sanctuary of Manhattan. One viewing of The Bonfire of the Vanities will reveal the consequences of leaving Manhattan. I decide to walk about halfway to get a good view of the city, but then it’s back where I came from

9:50am – Time for a break. I buy two hotdogs and a Gatorade near City Hall. As soon as the Arab man at the stand hands me the first hotdog, I take a bite and proclaim, “Hey, this is good. It tastes nothing like dung.” The man throws me a confused look, but I explain that Linda Kozlowski from Crocodile Dundee could be hurting his business because she claimed that NY hotdogs taste like “dung.”

“I sell lots of hotdogs,” he assures me.

10:05am – I begin my walk through the Bowery. Luckily, there aren’t a lot of pedestrians, so I can keep my distance from people. Regardless, I take my wallet out of my back pocket and hold it with a firm grip not knowing whether pocket-pickers like Cameron Diaz from Gangs of New York are on the prowl looking for an innocent tourist

10:43am – Board the #103 Bus that will take me to the Metropolitan Museum

11:32am – Arrive at the museum and I am thrilled to find that even Oregon State students receive the 50% student discount. The museum is fairly crowded, mostly with Asians who are constantly being reminded not to use flash photography.

11:53am – I walk by Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythym and overhear some uppity pedant explain to whom I can only conclude were students of some sort that he “hated saying it”, but he felt the lower left corner of the painting was “wrong.” Naturally, several tourists who were previously staring at the painting until they “got it” move in closer to hear the “expert” talk.

Wrong? I think. The entire painting is wrong. “Autumn Rhythym” my rear. You could dump a pile of horseshit on canvas, have a chimpanzee smear it all over the place and call it “Desert Sunset.” Then again, I would see “art pieces” that were eerily close to that at the Museum of Modern Art.

On the way out, a Chinese man strikes up a conversation with me.

“Beautiful,” he says.

“Pretty spectacular”

“No Picasso in Beijing,” he informs me (That’s also how I know he was Chinese).

“No kidding? Andy Warhol’s portrait of Chairman Mao is in the lobby of my hotel,” I tell him.

“Ahh,” he replies. I don’t know what he was thinking.

12:45pm – I cross through Central Park and head over to W. 81^st street in search of Christian Bale’s residence in American Psycho. I had been walking a lot up to this point, so rather than search for it myself, I decide to ask a traffic director.

“Where is the American Gardens Building?”

“The what?”

“American Gardens Building”

“It ain’t around here. I know that”

Damn

“Well, what about Waldorf Astoria? Is that around here?

“Nah, that’s Midtown”

“Does Paris Hilton live there?”

“Uh, I think maybe. Who cares?”

“I hear ya, Chief”

I receive a dirty look for speaking in their Native tongue

1:31pm – Arrive at Broadway and 112^th at the Seinfeld Restaurant. A Hispanic guy walks by and I ask him if he’ll take a picture of me under the sign.

“Sure,” he replies.

I look at the picture he just took and he completely cut the sign out of it. I explain it to him again, and he nods. The second picture was no better

“Thanks,” I say as I send him on his way. I’m convinced that “sure” was the only word he knew in the English language. I ask a white guy to take my picture the next time

1:58pm – Stop at a pizzeria for lunch. As I sit eating my NY style pizza, I laugh on the inside watching all these other tourists incorrectly fold their pizza as they eat it. I know that the “NY pizza fold” is a myth because in the beginning of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, there is a real New Yorker eating it sans fold

2:07pm – Get on the #7 towards Empire State Building

3:02pm – Get off the bus

3:14pm – Walk into the Empire State Building and use the bathroom first thing

3:17pm – Get in line to go to the top

4:29pm – Arrive at the top and enjoy the view of the city. A couple next to me (Turned out to be from Billings, Montana) are wondering if the Statue of Liberty is visible from out vista point. I tell them that it isn’t, and then I ask them which movie they more closely associate the building with, An Affair to Remember or King Kong.

“The original King Kong,” the guy says……………. I like this man already.

“What was the other one?” the girl asks.

“An Affair to Remember. The one they talk about in Sleepless in Seattle” I tell her.

“Oh, Meg Ryan is so cute,” She remarks.

That wasn’t my question, but oh well

6:30pm – After cleaning up at the hostel, I walk to the Golden Theater to see Avenue Q

6:37pm – Stop for two hotdogs on the way and ask for mustard, ketchup, and sauerkraut.

“I know what you’re thinking. No one puts ketchup on a hotdog,” I say to the Arab man, referring to Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry.

“Lots of people get ketchup. It’s why I have it.” He replies

I’m extremely confused. Even though Dirty Harry worked in San Francisco, I thought the hotdog rules were universal.

7:02pm – After eating my dinner and arriving at the theater, I talk to New York City Police Officer Smith (Seriously, that was his name), who had the unique job of being a horsecop. Being extremely impressed with how calm the horse was able to remain while vehicles shot by and missed the animal by mere inches, I decide to strike up a conversation with him. I ask him what the primary use of the horse is, and he says that he wanted the job to pick up women. Now that he’s married, he’s “as much of a gelding as the horse.” He also says that if someone decides to make a run for it, the horse is great because “they can’t outrun this guy.”

“With a horse, it's all in the gene. It's the gene that does the running,” I say, referencing Eric Roberts from The Pope from Greenwich Village.

“Yeah, you bet,” agrees Officer Smith.

10:22pm – Walk back from the show, which was great, and buy two hotdogs on the way. This shop has a sign that reads, “The Best Hot Dogs in New York”.

“Is that true?” I ask

“They all the same,” says the worker.

“Well, then I guess it is true”

“Yeah”

        So, at the end of the day, the biggest price I paid for anything was the blisters on my feet. I still don’t know if the city is correctly portrayed in the movies, but every time I put that theory to the test, I seemed to get ambiguous or perhaps indifferent responses.