vacayshh continued!

i'm having trouble come up with creative ways to start these posts about my NYC trip. not sure what the hang up is but i guess i'll just jump in and hope you'll read despite having no clever hook.

thursday night after riding the subway for about 45 minutes, i popped off and met up with my friend jared. i met him in albuquerque and it was really good to get to catch up again. we headed over to a bar where i had a fantastic watermelon beer. hopefully i can google it or shelley remembers what it's was called. it really was quite remarkable. shells and i were super excited to see each other again and it was great to meet some of jared's friends as well. after we made a schedge, we ended up dropping my stuff off at jared's (thank goodness...i was growing weary of the shoulder-dislocating-carry-on that i brought.) then we headed out and got food and more beer (queue pork slap ale). we actually got to this place (the name is evading me) around 9:30 and slowly ate and drank waiting for the happy hour to start at 11. once the hour struck though, we were informed by our waiter that they weren't doing happy hour because of a private event or something. keep in mind that the place was packed with people with no indication of a private event. and that he knew we had been waiting for happy hour. he knew this because we asked him immediately upon our arrival "when does happy hour start?" he said "eleven." we believed him. needless to say, we weren't too happy about that. jared ended up talking to a manager and somehow worked his magic because our $150 tab ended up being about $70.

we took our surly selves to a bar near columbia that was pretty packed with people. more beer was consumed and good times were had. i managed to leave a $10 bill instead of a $1.00 for a tip on the first beers for shelley and i. luckily the bartender was awesome about it and gave me my money back. thanks new york! after much beer consumption and long distance mocking of a seeming douchey guy and his entourage of women who seemed to just be tolerating him, we went to the restaurant made famous by Seinfeld. i ordered something called gravy fries, which are fries with gravy on them. go figure. :) they were actually pretty good though. shells and jared and i then went back to his apartment and went to bed. i was definitely exhausted after not getting a lot of sleep the night before. big thanks to jared for hosting us on night one of new york fun!