Choir Trip to DC

So about this time two months ago, my choir went on a trip to perform various concerts in Washington, D.C. I've been thinking a lot on how to narrow down the details of the trip to make it sound more interesting, but I eventually decided that maybe I should just go ahead and write it and see how it turns out. I don't consider myself one for proofreading, so hopefully no one is offended by my atrocious English.

We departed on Friday, May 24th at around 8 in the morning from Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and luckily I didn't have to get up too early to be able to get there on time. My mom was one of the parent chaperones, so of course we were late to the pick-up spot. Once there, every chorister grabbed his or her (mostly her, the ratio of boys to girls is something like 8:1) robes, folders, and lunch and headed onto the bus. We got to travel in a really nice tour bus, which made the 5 hour trip somewhat bearable, despite the fact that I had to watch movies targeted towards the 10-year-olds. I wanted to sleep for the majority of the trip, but I had to finish writing an English paper that was due that day since I had been too excited to do it the night before/put it off for too long that I physically could not write it because my brain was unable to function at 3 in the morning (mostly the latter). That probably wasn't my best decision.

Immediately after arriving in D.C. we had our first concert: a performance at a veteran's home just outside of the city. All the veterans were super cute and seemed really excited to listen to us sing which made the whole experience so much more fun. I had a solo singing "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music but I definitely butchered it. The organizers at the home provided us with snacks at the end which made everything better, and I may or may not have taken a box of girl scout cookies to our hotel...

The veterans' home is located on Abraham Lincoln's property, so we got a tour of the premises and I was able to take a couple photos with his statue. I guess it's the closest I'll ever get to an actual picture with him.

We did a quick tour of the Jefferson Memorial with our tour guide whose name I forget, so I'll just call her Mary Antoinette. I was sometimes unable to understand some of her English under her heavy French accent, but most of us weren't even listening to her because we were too excited not being in New York/singing.

The Prophet herself

After viewing the Jefferson Memorial, we got dinner at a terrible burger place called Hamburger Hamlet. I'm normally picky with with my food yet will also acknowledge if I'm being overly critical, but trust me when I say that this food was absolutely terrible. I was expecting a Shakespearean themed burger joint. My expectations were not met. Not even the cookies were good, and it's pretty hard to mess up cookies. We were very disappointed.

some mediocre Hamburger Hamlet salad

We then checked into the Sheraton Hotel at Pentagon City, just outside of DC. We were also there at the same time a huge Indian wedding was going on, so about one hundred women in saris were there to greet us in the lobby. I shared a room with two guys, who also happen to be the only other males in the whole high school choir. I had a lot of work to do but they were incredibly hyper and were excited by the whole experience so I got none of it got done. Of course, this led to a series of panic attacks, but needless to say, I survived the ordeal.

The hotel provided us with breakfast in the morning which was quite nice as I did not feel like putting on clothes to leave the hotel and eat at a restaurant. I made many people's mornings worse by taking photos of them as they ate.

We did a lot of stuff on this trip, and I'm afraid of boring you with boring stories of the touristy stuff we did. So, to give you a quick rundown of the 2nd day in DC, my choir visited the Arlington National Cemetery (which I skipped out on so I could do work on the bus) and the Capitol before performing at the Basilica of the National Shrine where we completely missed a measure of one of our songs because nobody decided to start singing. We then had dinner at the Kennedy Cafe which was quite good, and headed out on the balcony to take some pictures. Throughout the day, Mary Antoinette unsuccessfully tried to teach us random crap about DC but no one listened because it was incorrect random crap that no one cares about.

a pretty accurate depiction of my choir

The next day we performed at the Georgetown Presbyterian Church. We had to sit through the mass since we sang along to all the songs, but I actually listened to what the priest (a woman) had to say and found it quite interesting. I'm not a religious person at all but I think I felt more inclined to listen since I was forced to sit there anyway. We then drove to Georgetown University (my dad talked about the school while we drove there since Mary Antoinette was deemed incompetent at teaching us things) and sat around there for a bit. My mom and I ditched the choir afterwards so I could go back to the hotel and get some work done, as the trip was inconveniently taken just a week before finals.

On our last day we visited various attractions like the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials before returning home around 3 pm. After another 5 hour bus ride I got dinner with my mom and crashed once I got home.

I'm sorry this was not the most enlightening of posts but I had to write it simply because it's been in the works for 3 months. I will try to make things interesting from now on. I think I'm starting to put all the pieces of the blogging puzzle together.

Applause

Let me just take a second to say how obsessed I am with Lady Gaga's new song "Applause", and how disappointed I am that it only debuted at #6 on the Billboard charts while Katy Perry's new song "Roar" debuted at #2. I'm getting tired of sappy song after sappy song coming from her. And quite frankly I don't even think "Roar" is good at all. She needs to revamp her sound back to what made her famous, like "I Kissed a Girl" or "Hot N Cold", or maybe that's just me.

Also "Royals" by Lorde is the shit, even though she makes me hate myself because she's only 16 and has experienced a level of success that I never will. I think she comes second only to Jojo in terms of young teenagers who've managed to have significant success in music in recent years, even though Jojo's prime was back in '06. I wonder what happened to her...

Tallinn!

Hey guys! So I had limited access to internet while I was in Finland, and only two days after returning from Tallinn I left for St. Petersburg, where it was impossible for me to write anything since I purposely left my phone in Finland. So I'll just pick up where I left off:

We decided to go on a day trip to Tallinn since it's only a 2 hour boat ride away from Helsinki, and it would give us something else to do since we were spending so much time in Finland. Unfortunately, in order to spend the full day there we had to wake up at 5:30 to catch a 6:45 boat, but that was the only downside to the day, other than the sub-par cheesecake that I ate on the boat for breakfast.

We exited the boat at around 9 o'clock and made our way to the old side of the city, walking through a big shopping center along the way. It pained me to listen to the ads for the Regina Spektor concert which was happening in a couple of days and that I wouldn't be able to go to because I would be in St. Petersburg, but let's move past that...

If you've never been to the Old Town of Tallinn, it is absolutely gorgeous. It's one of the very few areas in Europe where they've kept a lot of the Medieval buildings intact, yet I don't think all the tourist shops were around when people lived there back in the Middle Ages. We walked around for ages admiring the buildings and walking into various shops. I also got to ride a Segway for the first time in my life, and now I want one even though most people look stupid riding them. My mom's host sister from Finland ended up crashing the Segway into the sidewalk and breaking it, ending that bit of fun.

Overhead view of the Old Town of Tallinn

Riding the Segway (FYI that's not me)

Most of the day was spent just walking around, as the old cobble-stone roads twist and turn seemingly leading in no direction. I went to a couple interesting museums and had a sub-par massage as well, but walking composed at least 50% of the time.  Because of this, I got to see a lot of traditional Estonian shops and cuisine, like McDonalds.

Probably one of the most interesting parts of the visit was going on the KGB tour at the Viru Hotel, especially since our tour guide was hilarious. If you're going to Tallinn for some reason I would highly recommend going on the tour. I would also not recommend going to the zoo as I heard it was quite sad and disappointing.

It started drizzling towards the end of the trip so luckily it was time for dinner. We went to this amazing restaurant with incredibly food that was surprisingly cheap. I think I had chicken for the main course and tried their frozen cheesecake for dessert. It definitely made up for the dry, stale cheesecake I had had in the morning.

Apparently I did not take any photos of my meal, but for some reason I took a picture of the restaurant

We started making our way back to the dock at around 9:45 since we had a 10:30 ship.

I don't know what I was thinking but I felt compelled to take this photo of a pidgeon

Unfortunately, the ship did not leave until 11:30 for whatever reason, but of course it had to involve the ship violently shaking for 20 minutes making me think the ship was going to sink, which is my biggest fear behind being murdered. Obviously that was not fun. Eventually the ship took off and we arrived in Helsinki at 12:30. I had tried sleeping on the ship by curling up between two chairs, which did not work as I woke up with a huge knot in my neck. It's safe to say that I slept well that night.

I have a lot of shit to write about so please bear with me if not a lot of it is out soon.

Fun in Finland part 1

I'm currently sitting in a lightless guest room at a family friend's apartment in Helsinki, after my mom forced me to turn the lights out because she wanted to go to sleep. I also can't type this on my laptop as my mom refused to buy an adapter for the trip, and has now succeeded in using my computer every day since we arrived last Thursday, draining my computer of its limited battery and forcing me to type this on my phone. But I'm a survivor.

I originally wanted to title this post "Hip in Helsinki", but I realized that that makes me sound like a total douchebag. I think "Fun in Finland" is an appropriate replacement.

I've been here for 5 days now, but I've spent half the time sleeping (almost literally) so I don't feel like I've done as much as I would have liked, but I still have over a week to make some magic happen. Still, I don't want to cram everything into one post. "Fun in Finland part 1" has already been a bit of a jumbled mess talking about nothing, and I don't want to make this any more chaotic than it already is. So I'll do a little introduction to Finland by discussing Helsinki's Market Square:

When I first visited Finland with my mom six years ago, Helsinki's famous Market Square was one of the first things she showed me, and one of the few that I can still remember vividly. While not impressive in size (it spans maybe 2-3 New York City blocks in length), it's a hotspot of Finnish culture.

The market square is composed of a mixture of food vendors and trinket sellers, much like a traditional flea market. In several tents, you can find little magnets with Finnish flags on them, moose with shirts saying "I <3 Finland!", or any of your other stereotypical tourist-y items. However, in most of the other tents you find items celebrating Finnish tradition: hand-made dolls line the walls of several shops, fur scarves or coats hang from the roof of tarps, and children's books detailing Finnish history lay in stacks on various tables lining the market. It comes as no surprise that tourists frequent the agora, making the Finnish population appear much more heterogenous than it actually is.

Of course, my favorite part of the market has to be the food. While I have yet to try any if the incredibly greasy fish vendors yet, the berry vendors and pastry shops are undoubtedly some of my favorite places in the world. 

Finland has the best strawberries in the world. You don't know a real strawberry until you've had a Finnish one. They're about a third of the size of a normal strawberry, but pack the same amount of flavor. If I could only eat Finnish strawberries for the rest of my life, I don't think I would complain that much.

However, if I could pick one other food to be able to dine on, the raspberry jam donuts would be a very close contender. They're very simple: a piece of dough with some raspberry jam fried and sprinkled with sugar. It doesn't sound too fancy, but sometimes stuff is better that way. And they shouldn't make it any more complicated, because it's perfect the way it is.

Now that wraps up all I have to say about the market square, but there is a lot more to Finland than just that. I'll hopefully be able to write about my day trip to Tallinn sometime tomorrow.

Moi moi (bye)! 

Lily Allen

A common interview question is something along the lines of "If you could have dinner anybody in the world, who would it be?" While I would like to come across as knowledgeable and cultured by answering with Madeleine Albright or Nelson Mandela, I would not. If I could share a meal with anyone on Earth, it would probably have to be Lily Allen.

But I'm not ashamed of that. While it would be absolutely amazing to meet the first female Secretary of State of the US or the man responsible for the end of Apartheid in South Africa, I would instead choose to dine with a British pop star.

Of course, I do have my reasons for feeling this way; I wouldn't say Lily Allen unless I meant it. First of all, I'm a huge fan of her work, which I think is a prerequisite for anyone being the answer to this question. Second, she's a good person. Despite her having the mouth of a sailor, Lily Allen never uses her language to rip on anyone, and she even attempted to remove a guy who made racist remarks off Twitter. But lastly, and the more important of the three reasons, I love her attitude. I'll extend point number 3 into a new paragraph.

Lily Allen's attitude is one of the best out there. I admire her for trying to ban the guy from Twitter who made racist remarks, because I don't think a lot of people would want to take a stand on something like that. She clearly doesn't take shit from anybody, and I'm incapable of saying that I can do the same. I've lived my life afraid of what other people thought about me, even if I didn't know at all: My mood can quickly turn sour if someone is giving me a strange look on the street because I think something's wrong with me. I worry that people make fun of me for something that I said or did once I leave the room. But I don't think Lily Allen gives a crap about what people think about her. I think Lily Allen lives her life the way she sees fit and tells everyone who tells her otherwise to go fuck themselves. That's the kind of attitude that I want for myself. I often feel held back because of my insecurities and self-consciousness, but I know that I could be a lot happier if I just let loose and stopped caring about what people thought about me.

And Lily Allen's music helps me do just that. When I listen to her, I think a bit of her attitude rubs off on me. I start seeing the world through her point of view, and it's a lot more enjoyable than my perspective. My lens is clouded by the outside world and my own inhibitions, while hers is clear and focused on whatever she wants to achieve. While millions of others have had this same perspective of the world and way of thinking, Lily Allen's has the biggest direct impact on me because I get to listen to her every day through her music. She is unknowingly helping me to become the person I want to be.

So that's why Lily Allen is one of the coolest people on Earth, and why I would probably prefer to have dinner with her than with Barack Obama.

16 should be the new 17

I guess you can call me a thrill-seeker now, considering I tried to sneak into a rated R movie.

Last week, I attempted to go see the The Bling Ring with one of my friends. Since we're both 16, we knew we technically should not have been allowed to go inside (you have to be 17 to see a rated R movie), but often enough the ticket venders actually don't give a crap and will let you go inside anyway without asking for ID. But, of course, this time the ticket vender actually did give a crap. After starting to tear one of our ticket stubs and directing us to our theater, she stopped saying, "oh wait. I need to see your IDs."

Since I am not 17, none of my ID would allow me to see the movie, and since I don't have a fake ID to use either, I realized there was no hope. So, I tried to play it cool: "Does an expired Barnes and Noble membership card count?"

"No. I'm sorry but I can't let you enter the theater"

While I was upset that I got stuck with the one ticket vender in the world who actually gives a shit about her job, I could tell that she felt bad about turning us away, which made me dislike her less. I was able to get a refund, so I guess it's ok.

I promise I'm not a Gangsta...

I've recently re-examined my reasons for wanting to start a blog in the first place: I hoped to become more adventurous and open my eyes up to the city by exploring new neighborhoods just for the hell of it; however, my blog has so far only been an account of things I would have normally done or experienced, rather than experiences that would make me step out of my comfort zone or known territory.

So today I tried to change that. I decided to go to Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown with one of my friends. While I visit all of these places on a somewhat-regular basis, what I did today is what I hope to accomplish more of in the future: walking around and trying to uncover hidden gems in the city to increasing my knowledge of the place I call home.

I spent the entire morning on the Upper West Side at a friend's house and finally went downtown at 5ish. I went to a place called Macbar for dinner. I don't know whether to call it a restaurant or not, but it's basically a tiny little shop that only sells macaroni and cheese. Of course, there are a myriad of different types to choose from, so you can never feel bored of mac & cheese. I got margarita macaroni and was given a noodle-shaped container to hold it in, which I still have. I've noticed that more and more places in New York are coming up with fancy containers for their food, probably just to charge more money for their dishes. However, the macaroni and cheese was reasonably priced ($8 for a medium container, which can serve as two meals for someone with a mild appetite).

After dinner, I went to Rice to Riches (website to come once it's finished), one of my favorite stops in all of New York. Just like Macbar, Rice to Riches only serves one type of food, but in this case it's rice pudding. I'm not normally a rice pudding fan, but Rice to Riches hits it out of the ballpark, not to mention all the funny signs that hang on the walls of the restaurant. It's always hard to choose from the variety of different flavors, but the butterscotch, cheesecake, and caramel are tough to beat. Rice to Riches also serves it's food in a nice container, which I've now started to collect and can use as tupperware for dishes I eat at home. However, Rice to Riches is very expensive, so I only go once every couple of months as to not go bankrupt.

The exterior of Rice to Riches

After, my friend and I just walked downtown a bit. We passed by a very nice balloon man, and I got my friend to pose for a couple photos with him:

We then went to a sketchy alley, where I took several photos of my friend hoping she would use them for her facebook profile picture, which she did.

 The day was pretty normal until two aspiring rappers came up to me on my way home and shoved a CD in my hands and demanded that I give them a tip for it. After handing it back, I walked for another block until I was approached by the same two men--they had been following me the whole time. I was not put at ease in spite of one of them telling me "Yo son, don't be worried. I promise I'm not a gangsta." They went and harassed some different people after my friend threatened to call the cops. It's useful having friends who actually have balls.

Overall, Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown are incredibly fun neighborhoods to go and visit, which is why I do it so often. Hopefully I'll walk around Brooklyn sometime soon, as I very frequently go there unless it's to get to the New York Aquarium to volunteer.