NY Roadtrip IV - Jersey City

Started driving the next day. Made it to Jersey City around.. noon. And then panicked. This is why. We live in a small college town. Very pretty. People here bitch about the government and everything else. But they obey traffic rules!! Drivers at AA are great!! Jersey City (JC) is full of jackarses who believe that they are driving 500 hp cars at the Le Mans tracks. All these losers who think that they make up for their pathetic lives by almost-roadkill every day. And the pedestrians…. They have no regard for inconsequential things like … cross walks. Crossing the street at random points is second nature to these suicidal bastards. Do the math! A 1500 kilo car coming at you at… 50 kph has a bloody lot of momentum! Which is somewhat difficult to bring to a complete halt.. in 2 metres. That is why traffic lights were invented idiot! Oh, and the traffic lights. They make no sense. I swear that I stood at a cross walk for ten minutes watching traffic go in every which direction without the pedestrian walk sign ever come on. And when it did, the lights also let the cars come through. Its as if JC has simply taken a vacation from coherent traffic. Its like its… India! Yes, that was what really hit me… if I had come to the US and stayed at some place like NY or JC, this wouldn’t have happened to me… the one year at AA has spoiled me. And of course, it was raining. Not like the proverbial cats and dogs, but the steady persistent rain which comes down with a fierce and terrible determination.. to utterly destroy your day. I keep expressing my views on rain in almost every other blog, but one of these days I am going to write the definitive treatise on rain. Until then…

Found the hostel. Found a suitable place to park.. am I kidding? There are NO suitable places to park in the city unless you consign the fate of your car to the gods above and the kindness of the people below. The latter does not show much of itself anyway. And found the hostel. So there are hostels, and then there are ultra shady places which somehow have linked to the website and are passing off as a place to stay. We were scalped, ripped off, taken for a ride, and then some by the shady people who run a shady hostel in a shady neighbourhood. At some length, and pain we negotiated a sum with the hostel lady, which allowed to us to more or less keep the clothes on our backs. Then food. This was another nightmare. There are no decent places to eat in the city. As in: none! We found this strange, dodgy Chinese place which said ‘dine in, or take out’. I am not a big fan of Chinese food when options are available… but for this once, I suggested we make it there. The joint was a take out only.. with people who either understood no English (or pretended no to.. its difficult to spend twenty seconds in Jersey City without becoming slightly paranoid). And it looked like some kind of mafia place where there are all these martial arts experts hiding behind the counter and all hell might just break loose while you are asking for a chicken hakka chow mein. So we left. And I called my friend.