Bigger than my head.

I ate a slice of pizza tonight that was almost unimaginably huge. And almost impossibly cheap. For $2.75 I got a slice of cheese pizza that was 1/8th of the jumbo pizza, which means 'you don't want even want to know how big the entire pie is.' This is going to be a weekend fixture, I can already tell. Especially since everything else is rather pricey in this city.

Something else that's big? The bookstores. I took a trip down the 1 to 42nd St.-Times Square station, then got on the NR to Union Square. A few of us walked around in the drizzle until we got to the Strand Bookstore, famous for its 18 Miles of Shelves. I spent a good deal of time just looking through the sale boxes, let alone browsing through the history and political shelves (and I didn't even make it to the design books). Great deals and sales on these books too; I got a few books about NYC, and forgot to pick up a box of really nice postcards for the 2nd round of mailings back to Lawrence.

From there, we simply looked for the nearest place to eat as it was pouring heavily outside, and thus I had my first (and hopefully last) trip to Quizno's. Walking down Broadway, we crossed over through NYU and Washington Square Park, before coming back up 5th Avenue with the Empire State Building rising above us the whole time. Meeting up with a classmate, we went west at 14th St. at the upper edge of the Village, then headed north to the Chelsea Piers to watch the Argentina:Mexico match. After overtime, we came back along 23rd St. to the 7th Avenue station for the 1 back to Columbia, and then had our slices of heaven.

All in all, a good day to really get out into the city and start realizing just how big and yet how local New York is and can be. If only it hadn't been so damn wet; the entire week was perfect warm, sunny weather while we were stuck here for 'class', and on our free weekend, we get this shit. I think I'm gonna kick back in the lounge downstairs, watch some TV, rest my legs from traversing the city in wet flip-flops, and reconstruct my resumé in a new word processor since I don't have Office on my MacBook. This is gonna be a good summer.