New York City 2018, Day One

We are in New York City.

We arrived at our hotel late yesterday afternoon--got to our hotel from La Guardia via a crazy taxi ride through the Lincoln Tunnel. After we checked in we brought our bags upstairs and then headed back out to find dinner. It was 90 degrees and about 90% humidity when we arrived, and unlike our desert home, it stayed 90 degrees and 90% humidity while we were out and about in search of dinner.

I had gotten up at 2:30 or so in the morning, got a forty minute nap on the plane, and by dinnertime I was toast. We walked out and put our names on the list at a ramen place, Tonchin Ramen, and then went and wandered about in the heat and humidity until I couldn't take it anymore. Then we went and sat in a Starbucks with iced drinks until the hostess from the restaurant texted that our table was ready.

Dinner was good, strange, and good. And loud. Very loud. The restaurant was tiny, perhaps forty people and ten tables, and had high ceilings and nothing to absorb the sound. They had music playing at an ear splitting volume and every other patron was screeching to be heard over it. I'm not complaining--not much--but I told Dave it was close to 100 decibels, he said not even close. It was more like 60 decibels, he thought. So he pulled out his phone and opened some app that measures sound in decibels and it turns out that we were both wrong. It was 68-72 decibels. According to various websites (I just googled), that is supposedly not that loud. Maybe I was just exhausted and feeling it.

But like I said, dinner was good. Strange, too. We each had an onigiri to start. Mine had unagi (eel), gari (pickled ginger), and sansho pepper in it. Dave's had one with chashu (bbq pork), spicy mayo, and sesame. Then we each had ramen. Mine was tonkatsu with roasted pork and Dave had spicy tan tan ramen which had everything in it apparently, including crushed nuts. I was stuffed, but they also had kakigori on the menu so we had to order strawberry kakigori with honey cream sauce. We made it almost all the way through the whole thing, too. By then I really was ready to collapse, so we paid our bill (almost reasonable, though even in Tokyo, $17 for a bowl of ramen would be considered highway robbery) and came back to the hotel.


I fell asleep right away but then was up in the night for several hours. Finally I was able to fall asleep again.