China Town and Little Italy

Last Wednesday, I went to explore Chinatown with a group of friends from the program. We took the Subway and arrived around 6:30, so the first thing we did was look for some food.

Now this may seem easy, but a lot of the places are....how do I put this.... really sketchy. In the hopes that we would not get some crazy disease, we finally decided on a sit down restaurant and I ordered orange chicken. I know, not very adventurous, but I thought being on that the safe side this time was a good idea. After dinner we all grabbed bubble tea because it was really hot out and started to hit the souvenir shops.

These places are insane to say the least. They are all pretty much the same, selling (really) cheap jewelry, scarves, watches, sunglasses, I love New York tea shirts, etc. The key though is finding the place that sells what you want the cheapest, and then bargaining for a lower price. One of my friends ended up buying 12 nice scarves for around $40! After shopping, we walked around and passed by several fruit stands, where I happened to find Jack Fruit.

Now the picture doesn't really do it justice, but these things were bigger than a large watermelon! As my father would say, "Go big or go home!" We eventually wandered into Little Italy and looked in at all the nice restaurants.

Then we found ourselves at the very beginning of SOHO, but it was too late by then to really go shopping because the stores all close by 9pm. It was a really fun and cultural night overall!