Day 10: Long weekend

📍 Location: Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, New York, USA
(My neighborhood)

After five long, tiring but also exciting weekdays it is finally weekend. And thank god it’s a long weekend, because the Americans celebrate Columbus Day today. I don’t know exactly what that means, but the important thing is that the school is closed today. Which means that I could sleep in late for three whole days! And that was much needed, because the bags under my eyes started to get almost black.

I haven’t done a lot of exciting things these days. Went out a little bit, but mostly chilled at home and did some of the necessarily stuff like going to the grocery store and doing my laundry.

After a lazy Saturday morning I met up with Nao around 3PM to go to the Chelsea Market and to the 9/11 Memorial Center. That last place made a huge impression on me. It’s hard to imagine that this huge tragedy happened at that exact same place just a few years ago. But when we went into the museum and saw a wall with all the faces of the poor innocent victims and their background stories, it suddenly became so real. It was very confronting. I have no words for that feeling.

Sunday I explored my own neighborhood a little bit. I hadn’t seen much of it yet, just the one street between my house and the station. I also went to Williamsburg, another neighborhood in Brooklyn which is known for its hipster vibe and all kinds of cool places. You’ll find the young and creative people of New York clustered together in this place. I went to a few vintage stores, walked around a little bit and went back home. I still needed to do my laundry really quick in one hour before I went to dinner with Nati, another girl from my class.

In retrospect, I could’ve done my laundry a little bit more efficient. It’s a long story, but at one point my white laundry was washing in this one laundromat and my black laundry in another five blocks away. It was a lot of running up and down, putting things in the dryer and pulling them out still soaking wet after half an hour. I was scared that my clothes were going to shrink if I would put the program to high. Well, it’s been 24 hours and everything is now hanging over each other over the side of my bunkbed, still soaking wet. But you’ll learn from it. The next time that I’m going to do my laundry it will be a successful story. For sure.

After this disaster I had to hurry to the subway. Nati and I were meeting at a Vietnamese restaurant called Saigon Shack in the lovely neighborhood Greenwich Village in Manhattan. This restaurant is my favorite place so far! They sell the best spring rolls and sweet potato fries for the cheapest prices, they’re fast and when your free glass of ice-cold water is empty, there will come a nice waiter and refills it immediately with more free ice-cold water. Well that’s something I like. Holland can take a good example from this. Why so greedy all the time? Just give someone a free glass of water. Bless you Saigon Shack!

Today was my least productive day so far. The weather wasn’t too good, so going outside was also not very appealing. I just went quickly outside to get some breakfast at 3PM. I skyped. Oh, and in the evening I was going to run with the Dashing Whippets Running Team. I found them online on this app called MeetUp, where you can meet up with other people in the city by applying for the same activities. I wanted to start working out again, because after four months of stuffing myself with free pasta and pizza at the restaurant where I worked, I’m not in the best shape. So I decided that it would be a good idea if I went for a run with a real motivated group of people.

The Dashing Whippets (I kind of like the name - it sounds like a group of fast people) were going to meet at 7PM, but unfortunately I arrived too late. What a surprise. They already left. Well, maybe it was for the best and I saved myself for what could've been a very painful situation. I decided to still go for a run by myself and noticed that after 2 miles, I was already completely exhausted. So I think that running 5 miles with a team that’s been running real marathons since they were born was probably somewhat over-ambitious. But one day I will be a Dashing Whippet as well. Watch me.

That was my weekend in a nutshell. Or maybe not in a nutshell - sorry for the length of this blogpost. It was probably not the best idea to stuff three days in one post.