The Usuals do New York, part 3
Katelyn Moore

Our hotel was nothing grand, but it was really nothing to sneer at. The Sohotel is supposedly the oldest hotel still in operation in the city, and, surprisingly, it isn't very expensive at all. The fact that three college students and a recent grad could afford it for a week says something about it.

The Sohotel is smack-dab between Little Italy and Chinatown, so just sitting at your window and watching the people go by is a neat experiment... except our window opened to the roof of whatever was downstairs (judging by the constant noise, I think it was a bar of some sort). That in itself was actually kind of cool, because we were able to open the windows and, while we didn't go outside, we did use the roof as our own little refrigerator for the sodas and bottled water we amassed like hoarded treasure. Since it hovered around freezing the entire visit, the roof-as-a-fridge thing worked great.

We got a room with two double beds, and, while they were large enough and all, they were the horrid plasticcovered crackly mattresses that you associate with your childhood years during the potty-training stage. That, or hospitals. So the mattresses were horrible, but other than that, the room was quite spectacular, especially considering how cheap it was. The bathroom in particular was magnificent: all marble, giant tub, and a toilet that tried to kill anyone that flushed it. It was the most violent piece of plumbing I have ever seen in my entire life, and you could always tell when someone was in the bathroom, not because of the tell-tale flush, but because of the scream of pure terror that accompanied the flush.

It might have been due to high water pressure, but the toilet flushed like a ton of bricks falling off a crane (which is something I have an interesting anecdote about, to be told later). It was terrifying. But we got used to it.

The best thing about our hotel was its location. We were about half of NYC away from anything we wanted to do or see, but we ended up exactly where we needed to be. God bless the people who decided the subway system was a good idea, because it saved our feet.

There were two stops on the subway that we used: Canal Street and Spring Street. Both were stops on the green line, which ran up to pretty much everywhere we wanted to go. But one of the most interesting things about the subway stations was just getting there.

Spring Street was the closest stop to our hotel. We walked a few blocks down and a few over and found ourselves descending a staircase into the ground. It was always interesting to walk back from the Spring Street station because our hotel was located in what seemed to be the lamp district. Every store around us sold lamps, chandeliers, and all other manner of decorative lighting. During the day, the lights were on and the chandeliers sparkled. At night, it was creepy. But we always knew we were close to the hotel by the sudden profusion of lamps.

The Canal Street station involved a little more walking and a lot more adventure. Canal Street itself is famous for its street vendors, and those are just the ones you recognize as such. People walking past will surreptitiously ask if you want to buy a "Chanel handbag" or "DVD," either of which probably was stolen in the first place (all the legit sellers had shops). To get to Canal Street, which is smack-dab in the middle of Chinatown, we had to go through Little Italy, where there were Christmas lights strung across the streets and all of the lampposts, street sign poles, and fire hydrants were painted green, white and red.

There were restaurants EVERYWHERE, and at every one there was someone standing with a menu trying to entice us inside (the food of NYC is another story, really), and between the restaurants were bakeries and souvenir stores.

When you came out of the relatively quiet streets of Little Italy, however, Canal Street hits you like a wave. We had to have some serious crowd-navigating skills to get from one place to another, and we also had to disregard Southern charm and just ignored people, because if we didn't, we'd be plagued by people selling things.

When we got about two blocks down Canal Street, there it was, looming out of the sidewalk like a mutant telephone booth: the Canal Street Station elevator. We never took it, because it looked really really creepy, but it was a great landmark. And from there, we had to get on the most convenient thing in NYC: the subway.--Katelyn Moore is a writer/reporter for The Forest Blade and may be reached at katelyn.forestblade@yahoo. com

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