An eventful day

Yesterday was a little better than usual days in terms of feeding me some excitement and momentary stimulus of adrenalin.

It was a little incident on the train which became one of the marking events of the day. I was traveling from NJ to NY as usual on NJ Transit train. And as usual the stations passed one by one. All of a sudden, while the train had stopped on one of the stations, there was some disturbance and movement in the passageway between cabins. And in the blink of an eye, some 4-5 cops entered the cabin from both the doors and shouted at us to get out of the train right then. I could not figure out what the situation was but no sooner had the cops entered than we got down the train and luckily there was another train on the other end of the platform which we could take and safely reach NY. Some action to start the day with!

In the evening, I had my team dinner which was at a steakhouse. One of my team members had organized the event and he was feeling quite uncomfortable when I told him that I do not even eat eggs. He specially asked the hotel manager to arrange for some vegetarian dish for me. We reached there and the restaurant was a very posh setup on 46th street of downtown New York.

The menu had only two types of items mainly. 2 pages full of wine varieties. And one page full of beef varieties. The price range of wine was astonishing and was suitable to people from most varied financial backgrounds. The range started from somewhere around $40 a bottle to the maximum which I could locate - $2000 a bottle. Such luxury and class.

My stubborn intolerance and dislike for alcoholic beverages prevented me from tasting the delicious looking drink which was smoothly making its way from the bottle to the glasses like a creek of divine liquid. Enticing and luscious.

And that 'special' vegetarian food item which was brought to me is beyond description. It was a mixture of various vegetables, some hardly recognizable by an average Indian, all of them in their most raw forms.

The funniest looked potatoes. It was called mashed potatoes. And the item was made out of one potato. Without exaggeration, it was literally plain boiled potato, and that too with the skin intact. Without any alternatives, I tried to eat something called asparagus and broccoli. The other half of the plate had mushrooms which I dislike from the bottom of my heart, spinach leaves and a few unknown (wild looking) vegetables.

Somebody had ordered a dish called creamed spinach. It did taste like the curry of our own Paalak Paneer. But by the time it had arrived on our table, I had lost all the enthusiasm to try anything at all. Thus I just had a spoon to make that fellow feel good who had organized this party.

The bill per head was around $150 dollars. I can state with confidence that this is the most expensive place I have eaten at. Or attempted to eat!

While returning it was quite late and people say it is not very safe to travel late in NY subway trains. I took my usual train from 53rd street to Pennsylvania station NY. There were not many people on the train. And once again I found myself in similar but much less thrilling situation like morning. Again the train stopped at a station and I heard the announcement that the train I was on will stop at the next station so whoever wanted to go to Penn Station, would have to change the train from that station. Once again people got down and we had to wait on a very threateningly quiet, small and dingy subway station. Finally I reached home at about 9.30 or so at night and it was the end to a 'not so normal' day.