Venture Into the Unknown (and how we ended up in Jamaica!)

Friday night = adventure.

I like adventure, and was up for the quest: to check out the MFA student galleries held at Queens College (in particular, to check out fellow OU grad Billy Steinman's latest and greatest). The school itself is way out there, deep into the heart of Queens, further out Long Island than I've ever been. Required us to take what I'll call the forever train (also known as the F) to get there. Once we got there, we had to transfer to a bus for the rest of the trip. Altogether, this easily took over an hour from Manhattan.

The event was really cool. Basically, about 20 of the MFA students had their individual studios open for viewing, and friends were invited to check out their works, say hi, see where they go to school, etc. There were some really interesting pieces there, mediums I had never seen before. One type of work I was fascinated by were these 3D latex pieces that had strings running through them, with interesting color arrangements. They looked like what might be the text book diagram of a cold sore or hypochondria. Then there was the bag lady, who had these incredible nets she had made by weaving together hundreds, maybe thousands, of plastic bags. Just wanted to climb them!

After we left, we waited a good 20 minutes or longer for the bus to come and pick us up. After getting totally passed up by one bus, we finally caught a bus which we thought would take us back to closest train station, the 7 station in downtown Flushing. We were wrong. We ended up going East, deep, into a part of town called Jamaica. Jamaica is far away from home. Very far! And we had still not eaten dinner either, and were in desperate need to get to a bathroom.

So we headed in this Mexican dive restaurant, which clearly had "Restrooms are for custumers [sic] only" across the door. El barracho met us at the end of front table / bar, and though I couldn't get him to understand that we had taken the bus the wrong way, he was kind enough to tell us it was ok to use the bathroom there. Thought about buying food, but nobody had said anything after we all took our turns, and maybe because the waitresses were all getting felt up by the other latino clientle, we just decided to duck out.

Still hungry, we loaded up on fried chicken and rolls at walk-up Kennedy Fried Chicken and headed down to the F train, which amazingly came within a couple of minutes. We killed the food and made good time back to the reality that is Manhattan and Brooklyn. We had clearly stepped outside our comfort zone, but with no real losses other than time and perhaps a quality dinner, had an unforgettable Friday night.