Day Three in New York

Day three was much the same as day two. We walked until our shoes dissolved and then walked a little bit more. There were a couple of interesting stores around. One called Auto advertised itself as “the mini department store”, but it looked like a regular store to me. We went to Soapology which is like Lush but classier. Inside, there was a little man in what looked like a 19^thcentury riding outfit, or at least, what I think a 19^th century riding outfit would look like. Upon seeing him I thought somewhere a grandmother is looking out her front door wondering where her lawn jockey went. Soapology has a bathtub in the store and they give each customer a hand wash, followed by a rejuvenating scrub and then some softening lotion. I couldn’t stop smelling my hands for three hours afterwards. I don’t remember all the product names but one of them was a walnut polisher which of course sent me into a fit of giggles. I would repeatedly tell Monkey that I needed to go polish the old walnut. This tickled me to no end and got absolutely no reaction out of her.

Another of my favourites was Mondo Kim’s, which has to be the greatest video store ever. It’s three (maybe more) stories of bizarre, obscure videos, the exact kind my brother and I love. An entire section devoted to women in prison flicks. Are you a fan of Blaxploitation? I know I am. Blacula, Blackenstein, Black Mama, White Mama, they’re all there.

I asked Monkey if she saw a comedy section anywhere and she replied, “no . . . oh wait, here’s UK directors.” Not really comedy, but good effort. I asked the cashier if there was a comedy section, he said, “like stand-up comedy?” I said, “any type of comedy”, he said, “no”. If you have no kind of comedy, why did you ask me what particular type of comedy I was looking for?

Me: Absurdist comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Physical comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Highbrow comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Three Stooges comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Vaudevillian comedy?
Him: No.
Me: Teenage coming of age comedy?
Him: No.
Me: College comedy?
Him: Yes. Wait, what did you say?
Me: College comedy.
Him: No.

We also went to Chinatown to purchase our bus tickets to Boston and visited the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory while we were there. The little man at Soapology told us about a brand of green tea ice cream that we could get in K-Town. Quickly realizing via the glazed look in our eyes that we had no idea what K-Town was he said, Korea Town. Well, that was convenient because we were staying in old K-Town. All this is moot though because we ended up getting the ice cream in Chinatown. Around the corner from the Ice Cream Factory is a Chinese candy shop. Rows and rows of glass jars filled with things you’d only see in medical labs. Pickled squid, honeyed hog snout, crunchy granola chicken beak; this is what they were trying to pass off as candy. There were also samples freely available so I tried one and immediately asked if they had a pair of scissors I could borrow to cut out my tongue.

After rinsing my mouth with bleach we went to the Fung Wah bus company to purchase our bus tickets. The Fung Wah travels New York to Boston and Boston to New York. Tickets are $15.00 and the bus leaves every hour, or when the driver is finished his cigarette and feels like it.