The quest: cheap, tasty food.
The place: Manhattan.
Start: On the way to meet Matt Ritter, Colin and I pass a truck giving out "free" ($1 donation suggested) coffee served over ice cream with fresh whipped cream. This was, apparently, a promotion for a new airport in Austria that's opening just now. We were... confused. It was delicious.
We found Matt. And then we found empanadas (pumpkin-scallion). I also had strawberry lemonade.
And then we had some haddock at A Salt And Battery down the street, during which a conversation on the disproportionate psychological perceptions of the statistical likelihood of disastrous outlier occurences was started...
...and continued as we walked all the way down 12th to Stand 4, where we consumed sweet potato fries, veggie burger, and 3 different milkshakes (pumpkin, roasted marshmallow, and mint).
This made us full. So we took a break and walked to Union Square, where people were doing chalk art (among other things).
I also found tea!
And I drank it. Matt was overly enthused by this. I think we were all on sugar highs from the milkshakes. Also, we did not plan for matching t-shirts; it just happened that way.
Washington Square Park was under construction, alas.
So we went to the NYU Computer Store instead, where Colin for some reason thought it was amusing to watch me get increasingly excited about the interface design (and signal processing and math and... well, you get the idea) books. This photos is more to remind me to send those guys more information about DiBono and Polya's books on problem-solving heuristics than anything else (because that's what I was in the middle of explaining here).
Then we went to Max Brenner's. Max Brenner's is a chocolate place in my favorite part of NYC: in one place, you can look around and see a giant bookstore (The Strand), a comic/graphic-novels store, a movie theatre, and Union Square. Alas, the Virgin megastore closed since the last time I was here. And chocolate, of course.
Very much chocolate, in fact.
We were impressed.
It was delicious. Matt and I split a hazelnut-chocolate-other-stuff-we-forget-but-it-was-delicious milkshake. Then we started debating how the cup was manufactured. (He thinks it was formed in one upright piece from a simple normal-cup mold and then folded in; I disagree and think it was a complex mold because of the lack of visible stress/buckling around the fold area the straw goes into. Neither of us know that much about ceramics, though.)
Colin, on the other hand, decided on a more direct delivery method for his chocolate.
But obviously we hadn't gotten enough chocolate, so we walked over to Times Square...
Colin's friend John had joined us by this point. They got into an Android-enabled phone war on who could find our next destination first (John won).
Also by this point, the day had turned from hot and muggy (we'd been walking New York and slowly wilting in the heat) to cool and breezy, which was amazing. We sat by Central Park and yammered about open source business models for a while, then decided to skip the remaining restaurants (SuperMac, Two Boots, Moaz Falafel) due to appetite and budgetary constraints. Aww.
We did get rice porridge at Congee Village at the end of the night, though I forgot to take a picture before I had finished mine (pork and preserved egg). Matt and John thought it was bizarre, but found they actually liked rice porridge. I have introduced my friends to new things. Triumph!
I followed Colin home and we talked until past 3am. Then I drove back to Boston.
It was a good day. I should like to do this again.