I am so going to need a vacation from this vacation. Unfortunately for me, I’ll be only home in my apartment for just a few days before leaving for the City of Angels next week for a conference. So I’m going to be spending less days in Chambana than outside it, ironically enough. And instead of going to sleep, I am here in the computer lab of a certain dormitory in Columbia University frantically trying to jot down the happenings of the last two days before their memories equilibriate into thermal noise while my cell phone charges through the USB port. (I can’t afford not to; not only is it my night light, it is also my alarm clock and flight reservation record keeper. Oh, and did I mention it makes and takes calls too?)

So yesterday my friend and I went to Coney Island to watch that silly hot dog eating competition. It was kinda disappointed due to the humongous crowd; it was pretty hard to see the main action occurring on stage. Takeru Kobayashi won, predictably, albeit with a score of 49 hot dogs (down from his original record-smashing 50 in 2001). But scarily enough, this 99-pound woman managed to wolf down 37 hot dogs in 12 min, snagging a new women’s world record. Kobayashi stuck around for interviews with the media and posed for 1 on 1 photos too. (I never realized his arm muscles were humongous. Well, I guess he put all that protein to good use then.) We managed to swipe some of the hot dogs off the photo shoot plate once they were done; they were pretty good but nothing really super spectacular. Oh well, I guess it’s not everyone who can claim to have helped clean out Kobayashi’s plate.

Walked around Water St. for the open air street festival but it was entirely forgettable save for the cloudless, perfect blue sky that set the stage for riotous festivities later. Managed to snag a table at the super-crowded Serendipity 3 and had their famous Frozen Hot Chocolate. Imagine 750 mL of pureéd cocoa powder ice kachang with whipped cream. Yeah, that’s how much chocolate there was. The caviar burger was an interesting windup to a decadant meal as well.

But of course one the true highlight of the day was the Macy’s fireworks display. In a stroke of inspiration, we decided to hit the shores of Brooklyn in order to catch the fireworks over the skyline of midtown Manhattan. Landed up on the tip of the southernmost jetty of Gantry Plaza and caught easily the most spectacular fireworks show I’ve ever seen in my life. 35 minutes of raw firepower shooting up in the sky makes for pretty impressive displays, including oddities such as pairs of dice, smiley faces and interlocking starburst rings. And the colors too! It was such a glorious preening of ionization chemistry.

Met up with Kevin and Penny after the festivities. Worked on a little surprise; watch Kevin’s space for updates. Met up with yet another blogger, fortycalibernap of malefactor this morning and had an hour-long talk with him while my friend went in to explore the caverns of the United Nations building. Turns out my hypothesis of him having previously worked in Singapore was wrong; he really just happened to stumble onto the Singapore blogosphere by seeing popagandhi up for nomination for a Bloggie. He is very impressed by the childlike (not childish!) innocence that many Singapore blogs exhibit. Lots more about this at a later time.

Took the A train, not to Harlem, but to the Cloisters. A relatively unknown campus of the Met, the Cloisters is really a fabulously reconstructed medieval monastery, housing original fragments of ruins from all over Europe as an architectural display. The view of the Hudson was beautiful, if not for the universal mugginess that shrouded the entire river. I bet it’s the result of the detritus floating around in the air from yeaterday’s fireworks spectacular.

Finally managed to catch Shakespeare in the Park today; the horrible long line of Sunday was but an unpleasant memory. We still didn’t get tickets outright at first though; we were given standby vouchers and had to return quite a bit before the start of As You Like It. It started late too, with Act I beginning only at 2020h or so. Really unprofessional and disappointing. I don’t care if it’s a New York tradition to begin late; punctuality should have been something sufficiently basic that it should have been a given rather than a special treat.

But whatever. The Delacorte Theater was a rather unremarkable 1880-seat open-air amphiteater, if not for its unusual location and its gorgeous night view of the Great Oval and Upper West Side. The acting was forgettable; even the famous “All the world’s a stage” passage wasn’t particularly memorable or otherwise. And despite the rushed quality to the acting, the play managed to drag all the way to 2325h, which pretty much crushed my hopes ending the trip with a nice long sleep until tomorrow’s long ride home. But whatever, I’m pretty happy with the holiday. I just hope I’ve not completely worn out the magnetic strip on my MetraCard. I must have hit the gantries at least 50 times so far; so many, it’s not even funny.

Till Chambana beckons.