Pub Crawl (Sort Of)

Friday night I had dinner with a friend and then went on a whirlwind pub crawl. First, I got some tasty Lychee ice cream, which contributed to my urgency to seek out a bathroom quickly. Luckily, we came upon Double Happiness, the first of several lukewarm spots (previously hot/trendy places that are just "passe" now) she showed me. Now, I found the name pretty amusing because as a wedding tradition, Chinese people like to connect two paper cutouts of the character "happiness" together as one word and post it everywhere. The lounge itself was pretty cozy and somewhat mysterious because of the low lighting. It was mostly empty when we were there because we were definitely early for a Friday night. After I used the "facilities," we continued our pub crawl quickly because I was in explorer mode and wanted to check out as many places as possible.

Next she led me to a strange dessert store called "Rice to Riches." The speciality there was rice pudding, which is a pretty weird concept to me, as I don't recall ever eating it before. There were many different flavors, each with a Ben and Jerry's-ish name like "Obscene Orange." I found the decor and lighting futuristic and sampled the International Flavor(??) with her. Unfortunately, She didn't find it quite as intriguing and tasty as I did.

After a little bit of ice cream, we went to 8 Mile Creek, a pub with an Australian flavor. It was a really cool place that looked very fun. Outside there was a suit of rusty armor. I took a picture besides it. I think I looked really short because the armor was almost 7 feet tall and I was kind of leaning forward in the picture.

Then we made our way to Pioneer, a really really cool lounge/bar that had a huge plasma screen, a quite spacious lounge, and interesting lighting that made it feel pretty intimate despite the the cavernous size of the place. Very very cool place that I definitely wouldn't mind going back to again.

Next we moved on Lickwed, where a portly but extremely friendly bouncer giving us a tour of the place. It had 3 floors, which composed of a dance floor, a lounge and a bar. At the entrance, there were several computers with free internet access. The funniest part of his little tour occurred when he was explaining the internet access part. He actually said, "You know the internet? It's like email, the web and all this other cool stuff." Then he talked about how Mary J. Blige had a party a couple of weeks ago and there were a bunch of NBA players that came too.

Ok, the last place on our little jaunt in lower Manhattan was Happy Ending, which had a very interesting history. Supposedly, it used to be one of those shady Chinese "massage" parlors, where prostitution mostly likely took place behind closed doors. The inside was really weird and the new owners actually kept the shower heads and sauna rooms. In fact, some of the tables were right below the shower heads!! There was a hint of danger and intrigue that lurked in this place, and I have to admit I felt somewhat drawn to it just because of the bizzaro factor.

Man, I love this city!