Friday: Various Restaurants, and a Planetarium Show

Friday night Wesley and I hunted for entertainment.

We first tried a Japanese/sushi restaurant in Times Square: Haru. The food was decent. The decor was nice, with bamboo blinds dividing various parts of the restaurant, and a (as it should be) an open sushi bar so you could watch the chefs make the food.

We then went to Hayden Planetarium and saw a show of light & music called Sonic Vision Basically it involved watching cool effects presented on the hemisphere above you while listening to music of varying quality. Visually it was great, especially near the beginning; after that more of the visuals were spherically symmetric so I think some part of my mind shouted "that is too easy to make: even if it looks somewhat neat or presents something interesting you can't respect it that much." Aurally it started off sucking -mostly bad hard rock songs- but then they played some U2 and then later more U2, Coldplay, and Moby, so it didn't end up being sub-par music all the way through.

We walked around the upper west side a bit looking for something to do. The area was happening. We found an old-school malt shop with a (small, inexperienced) jazz band. But the shop was cute!

Then we wandered down to Times Square looking for more stuff to do. Times Square, as always, was packed. We watched people for a while while contemplating the fact that late at night in any city generally your only options are alcohol or food. Well, at least that was what I was contemplating. I can't speak for him. (I guess NYC is a little different because some funny guy we were watching kept giving out tickets to a comedy show starting at 12:30 or 1:30am. He was fun to watch; he has his shpeal to attract passers-by down cold and it was good and got their attention. Or I suppose we could've followed one of the flyers people kept handing out and head to an adult show.) Eventually we got a round of drinks and called it a night.

It turned out to be a reasonably good night, and since the activities were date-type activities, it would've been nicer if Wesley happened to be, well, a cute girl I liked. :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I really love laser light shows like those. I wish I could find some in NoCal. In utah, they do the same thing (http://www.utah.edu/Planetarium/HPShowCal.html) calling them "Laser Music Concerts" wehre you can choose if you want to hear U@, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, Metallica. It's really a lot of fun.

I never thought about the spherically symetrical aspect. I guess that's true of what I used to see too. I think not realizing at the time was a good thing. Though during U2's "mysterious ways" (I think that's the title) they have an image of a woman dancing.

BB