Today, Rachel did the unthinkable. She bought the Backstreet Boys' new album. OMGGG did I just say that? And worse still, do that? I'm pretty sure someone hypnotised me into doing it. I should have worn a paper bag over my head when I paid for it! Or. I can just plain proclaim that I kind of (okay. DO) like them all over again and try to make it seem like it's actually a really cool thing to do that now. Go, power pop!

Anyway. I should really start talking about THE SECOND DAY in NY. Somehow, I have this feeling that I'm not going to finish this NY recap. I mean, we spent 10 days there, and now I'm only at day 2. It's kind of sad. This totally proves that I should talk less and practice harder at being more concise.

We went to see the Statue of Liberty! It's pretty awesome. I love the colour. We took a cruise (hello fat seagulls!) to Liberty Island, where it's situated. Besides taking tons of pictures of the statue, we also had a Dead Leaves Party. Actually, it's more like we had a lot of fun playing with all the fallen leaves (there are that many) there. I got a really cool SoL bobblehead pen for BFF Charles at the souvenir shop. He's going to love it. After the cruise, we went to this shopping mall near the Brooklyn Bridge for lunch. We had Nathan's Hotdogs. Nathan's Hotdogs=YUM. Seriously. But there was no time to shop! Because we (I'm acutally not really part of that 'we') thought that we couldn't miss out on a photo op with the bridge in the background. Okay, it was pretty fun. After that, our Lower Manhattan tour guide (he's Chinese and has been living in NY for years. But he's actually not that fluent in English. Mmm hmm) brought us to Wall Street, past the Trump Building (Hi Mr Trump!), the NY Stock Exchange, and to Ground Zero. Oh. And along the way, our tour guide lost us. I know. How is that even possible?? Thank God for handphones.

At night, we went to Parsons the New School for Design. I was so excited. Tim Gunn practically has his footsteps all over that place! I only mildly worship the guy, okay? Then I realised that the school is actually split up into different buildings which are all over the place. Riiight. And then WE realised that the Graduate Open Studios we were going to view was actually meant to be an invitation/expectation-only event. But...we basically crashed the whole thing. Most of us weren't too thrilled with that prospect, but the works we saw were really, really fabulous and will definitely go into the Big Idea Vault for coursework 2008. We would have missed out on a lot if we hadn't gone ahead. The works were really experimental and original, even though the final pieces weren't all huge and imposing and flawless-looking. Each student had their own space to show off their prep work too and they are so so so creative BOTH in ideas AND process I wanted to hang my head in shame. It was pretty exciting and nice to talk to some of them (and steal their ideas). The cheesecloth and plaster guy was really nice.