Labor Day Weekend of 2021 was the sixth weekend I'd be spending in the northeast during my long stay in Maryland, and since it was a four-day weekend for me, I'd lined up a trip that was going to be the most memorable of my weekend excursions. Thus far I'd already visited Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC and now I was going back to New York for another, longer stay.

This trip was planned around a music festival I'd only found out about that year, Electric Zoo. I'd discovered this festival while searching for one or another I could go to in 2021 but initially ignored it because it was in NYC and thus a long way away from where I lived in Clovis, New Mexico. But when I found out I'd be spending a couple months in Maryland which included Labor Day Weekend, a festival in NYC, only three hours away by train, suddenly became feasible. Since I needed to provide an address for the organizers to mail my wristbands to, and I wouldn't be anywhere near my home address by the time they would get around to doing this, my relatives in Rahway, New Jersey, graciously let me use their address. The wristbands showed up in their mailbox about two weeks before the event.

Friday, September 3, 2021

I'd booked this train trip, and the associated hostel stay, months earlier in New Mexico, long before I'd even envisioned the other preceding trips. I left the train station at BWI Airport on Friday morning on Amtrak's Vermonter. As expected, it took about three hours to get to New York's Penn Station, during which I started reading a rather thick book I'd bought three weeks earlier in Philadelphia: Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

My first stop was going to be Rahway, New Jersey, where I'd have lunch with my family and pick up the festival wristbands. To get there, I should have stepped off the train when it stopped in Newark and gotten on a NJ Transit train from there, but instead unknowingly needlessly burned up an hour riding all the way into New York Penn and turning back around. Naturally the NJ Transit train I boarded there went through Newark on its way to Rahway.

Rahway's train station.

After waiting a little while at the Rahway station, my aunt and uncle picked me up there and we had lunch at a great Italian restaurant, Il Forno a Legna, in that city's little downtown. If you ever find yourself in Rahway, I'll recommend this place.

While we ate inside, there were quite a few restaurants in Rahway which had outdoor dining. As I was told then, these restaurants only started doing this during the pandemic because diseases spread more easily indoors. Because I like the atmosphere of outdoor dining, I sure hope the trend sticks around.

After lunch we drove back to their house, and along the way we drove through a neighborhood that had been hit hard by the recent historic flooding. As you may recall, NYC and north Jersey had been hit hard just a few days earlier with rainstorms that caused the worst flooding that area had ever seen. Along one street, every house had loads of furniture and appliances set out in the front yards, because these things had previously been in the houses' basements and had been rendered useless junk by the floods. My relatives' house had been mostly spared, being located further away from the Rahway River, but the basement had taken on some water for the first time anyone could remember and there were fans running downstairs to dry out the carpet.

After we were through catching up, they drove me back to the train station so I could get on the next train bound for New York Penn. I took with me the envelope that contained my two Electric Zoo wristbands, one for Friday and Saturday and the other for Sunday.

Now back in the city, I started walking east from Penn Station toward the Chelsea International Hostel, which wasn't too far away. But I naturally got distracted by the kind of establishment of which I have to visit in every city I travel to: an Irish pub. This one was called Blarney Stone. Here I had an Irish coffee, which was pretty good, followed by a beer I hadn't had in a long time, Yuengling. Little did I know, I would be drinking a lot more Yuengling almost two months later at another festival in Florida.

Broadway and 5th Avenue while walking from Blarney Stone to the hostel.

Chelsea International Hostel where I'd be sleeping every night, was where I got to next. My room, up a few flights of stairs, was the tiniest hostel room I'd ever stayed in, with only two beds in it. Every night, there was someone else sleeping in the other bed, but it was always someone different every night.

Getting to the festival took a little longer than expected, thanks to my still being a little unfamiliar with the city. If you haven't spent enough time here, it's easy to look at Manhattan on a map and think it's just a tiny little strip of land. From the 14th St/Union Square subway station I had to ride the 6 train north all the way to 125th St in Harlem. This journey lasted somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes. It's definitely more than just a little strip of land! After stepping out of the 125th St station there was a bit of a walk to the festival which was on Randall's Island.

Between Manhattan and Queens there lies an island, which was once two, known as Randall's and Ward's Island or just Randall's Island. Originally it was two islands, one called Randall's and the other Ward's, separated by a narrow creek, but at some point in the last century engineers filled the creek in with soil to make it all one. While not part of Manhattan Island, it is part of the borough Manhattan, and it serves as the junction point of the three-way Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly known as the Triboro Bridge) which connects Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx.

Electric Zoo was happening on Randall's Island. To get there from Harlem, I could've taken a shuttle bus, but instead decided to walk there on the RFK Bridge, which took a few minutes. Then I had to wait in a line to show my vaccination record, get a "Covid Safe" wristband put on, and then finally scan my festival wristband and enter...

After over two years, it felt really great to see a scene like this.

The last music festival I'd been to at this point was Untold in Cluj, Romania back in August of 2019. That was a hiatus lasting just over two years, which I'd never expected when I walked out of Cluj's Central Park after Nora En Pure's set on that Sunday night back then.

After getting into the festival, I first had to associate my wristband with my credit card so I could pay for drinks and food by scanning the wristband. This involved waiting in a long line; earlier I'd tried to do it through the Electric Zoo app on my phone, but their servers were so swamped that this was impossible and so I had to do this there at the festival.

The beer selection was OK. They had, I think, Amstel Light, Stella Artois, and Heineken available, plus a range of different flavors of White Claw, along with a couple of canned wines.  Food was pretty good too, although I unusually didn't take note of what I ate. I do remember having a falafel wrap at least once in here, something that this city was turning me on to. Since I don't remember anymore, let's just assume that every night I had a falafel wrap or a gyro or something like that, because that's what I most often gravitate to at festival food courts.

"EZoo" wasn't quite as impressive as Untold or most of the other festivals I'd gotten used to over the last few years. It had its moments though. Friday night I got to see a great set from Seven Lions on the main stage. My favorite part of that was when they played "Strangers," a song I've gotten more and more nostalgic about in the last few years. After that set, I went over to the nearby Riverside stage where I caught the last minutes of Cosmic Gate, who were followed by Alpha 9, who I hadn't heard of before but enjoyed for a little while.

I don't think I stuck around much longer after taking in a bit of Alpha 9's set. Soon I was back in Harlem--I can't remember if I took the shuttle bus or walked over the bridge. But before getting to the subway station, I found a bar there in Harlem called Harlem Shake, where I thought I'd stop for one more beer that night. I had a Coney Island Mermaid Pils. Like so many other American craft beers, it may have had "Pils" in the name but it tasted really hoppy and bitter, more like an IPA which I don't like as much.

It seems they also have iced tea, watermelon cooler, and lemonade.

Saturday, September 4, 2021

Stepping outside the hostel, I needed to find somewhere to get breakfast. As I discovered, the best place was just down the street and across an intersection, and it was called Adam's Deli. This was yet another thing I was quickly growing to love about NYC: all these corner stores, locally called "bodegas," which have everything you'd expect to find in a convenience store, but are also delis that can serve you delicious, freshly-made sandwiches which they can also grill right there in front of you. This is exactly what Adam's was. Here I got a grilled sausage patty and a scrambled egg, cooked right there on the grill, on a bagel, and naturally coffee with that. Now this was delicious! This corner store deli concept seriously needs to be imported into other cities. Even in Philly and DC I had to get breakfast from 7-Eleven, which wasn't nearly as good.

The next stop was a place I'd been to two weeks ago, the American Museum of Natural History. My reservation was at 10am, right as it opened. Unlike my last visit, I wasn't in a mad rush to get there on time, and actually found myself standing in a long line outside, waiting to get in.

While standing in the line, I looked over what I was wearing and wondered a little if I was just a bit underdressed for this establishment. It's not that I looked much like a wook; I just thought that my worn cargo pants, Electric Forest 2018 shirt, and four years' worth of old festival wristbands clashed somewhat with the atmosphere of the museum. Then I surveyed the other people waiting in line and found that at some point behind me, there was a raver couple that looked like they had just walked out of Electric Zoo. He was wearing one of those furry animal headdresses, and she was in a bright swimsuit and fishnet stockings. Compared to them, I thought, I'm overdressed!

Inside the museum, I tried to visit all the halls I missed two weeks earlier, which was easier since, unlike last time, I wasn't pressed for time. First, I found my way to the Hayden Planetarium. That massive sphere you see when you look at the planetarium contains two theaters. The top half is where the famous space shows can be seen, the currently-running show being Worlds Beyond Earth which I saw two weeks earlier. The bottom half runs a free show, narrated by Liam Neeson, about the Big Bang, the event that started our universe. It was impressive, but only lasted about four minutes. Being in the bottom half of a sphere, the theater's screen was like a bowl that you look down into while you stand behind a railing.

After the planetarium I went through the Hall of Planet Earth. One part of this hall was all about geology, plate tectonics, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Another was devoted to climate change, which you can learn about through interactive screens all over the walls.

In this massive museum there will always be a few temporary exhibits for which you must pay extra, on top of the museum's admission fee. This includes the planetarium's space shows, which is what I went with two weeks earlier. This time, I decided to go with "The Nature of Color." You might not expect a subject as simple as color to be the basis of an interesting exhibition, but it really was. Color was an unexpectedly fascinating topic to explore, ranging from how colors can be formed from combining lights of two or three different colors, how we get pigments of various colors, what certain colors mean in the world's many societies, how animals use their bodies' colors to fit in with their environment. Let's take a closer look...

Here's a room all about the many shades of the color blue. Much of this room covered the history of cultivation of indigo, a plant that produces a blue dye and was highly valued for that purpose for centuries.

Here's an interactive game where you can dye fabrics with indigo in different patterns.

This room shows us how red has often been associated with power, as demonstrated by garments like cardinals' robes.

From a room devoted to green, which focused on that color and others' appearance in nature. Here we see how the non-venomous milk snake evolved a similar color pattern to the poisonous coral snake, to keep predators sufficiently scared away. At one time in your life you may have learned the rhyme "red on yellow, kill a fellow, red on black, friend of Jack," which helps you to distinguish the two. I've still never seen either of these kinds of snake with my own eyes, though.

There was plenty of other eye-catching stuff throughout the exhibit. There was one interactive game where you try to guess what various color-related expressions mean in various cultures throughout the world. There was a wall on which a white light constantly shines, and you can hold up tinted pieces of plexiglas in front of it to change the colors. And then there was this interactive wall:

Tinker with the palette and watch the colors on the wall change.

And finally, as we walk toward the exit, the last kind of pigment we learn about is the kind in our own skin. Please take the time to read the sign. As it says, "people are 99.9% genetically identical." If we were dogs, we'd all be the same breed.

Right outside The Nature of Color there was a hall full of dinosaur skeletons where I spent some time. Interesting to look at--they had an apatosaurus and a tyrannosaurus rex--but I'm not quite fascinated by dinosaurs as much as when I was six.

After the dinos, I went back to a hall I had all too quickly rushed through two weeks ago and wanted to see more of: the Hall of Human Origins. This time I took my time to look at everything. They've got example fossils of every human ancestor species there is, and often they have the most famous example of many of these species. Here you can look on the 3.2-million-year-old remains of "Lucy," the type fossil for Australopithecus afarensis which was unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, as well as the 1.6-million-year-old skeleton of "Turkana Boy," an eight-year-old Homo ergaster who had lived in what is now Kenya. They also have bones of our more recent ancestor Homo erectus from 400,000 years ago, a complete 50,000 year old skeleton of our cousin-species-once-removed Homo neanderthalensis from which most of us have inherited some DNA thanks to ancient interbreeding, as well as the skull of a Homo florensiensis, the 18,000 year old "Hobbit" found in Indonesia in 2004. All this I found endlessly fascinating. At each skeleton they had informational signs showing how we know we're descended from these extinct hominids.

When I'd had my fill of the museum, I took a walk through one of the world's most famous parks, Central Park, which the museum was right next to. Even if you've never visited this city in your whole life, you've probably heard the name "Central Park" before. It's an expansive, rectangular green space right in the middle of Manhattan, and it's full of winding walking trails, scenic lakes, trees, baseball fields...it's the standard by which all city parks should be measured. The natural history museum is right next to the western edge of the park. After strolling along the trails through the park I emerged on the east side on 5th Avenue. Around now I was feeling like getting something for lunch, and since restaurants are so widely distributed throughout the city all I had to do was walk down the street and pick something that looked good.

I settled on Altesi, an upscale Italian restaurant near the intersection of 64th and Madison. It was OK. This place was, I think, a little overpriced. I had some kind of salad, which was underwhelming considering the price, and some red wine. Ah well, I guess I saved room for whatever delicious wrap I was going to get for dinner in the festival.

Later, after a stop in my hostel room, heading back in the general direction of EZoo, I stopped in a sports bar in Chelsea called Boxers, where I had a Stella Artois. Then I got back on the subway, but instead of going straight to Harlem, I stepped out in the vicinity of Grand Central Station just to look around for awhile. Grand Central is a famous train station known for its fabulous design...

Grand Central serves as the main hub and southern terminus of the Metro North Railroad. From here you can catch trains to Connecticut and upstate New York.

I could've gotten back onto the northbound subway right then, but got distracted yet again, by a bar called Bar Room at Lexington and 59th Streets. Here I first got a great German beer, Weihenstephaner, followed by a Pennsylvania craft brew, Victory Golden Monkey, which was 9.5% abv and tasted like something from a Belgian monastery. By this time I'd already missed a good deal of the festival; John Summit and Martin Ikin had already played and Sonny Fodera was about to go on, but the beer made it almost worth missing all of this.

Finally, after dallying and tarrying in Bar Room, I finally walked back to the subway, rode the 6 up to Harlem and caught a shuttle bus into EZoo. Maybe I missed a bunch of artists I like, but there was still some good stuff to be heard and seen. I think either Tiesto or Rezz, both of whom I've seen before, was on the main stage when I walked in. Kaskade closed down the main stage that night and I was there for the whole set. This was the fourth Kaskade set I've experienced live, the first three being a stop on the Freaks of Nature tour in San Antonio in 2012, the Lights All Night festival in downtown Dallas in 2013 in support of Atmosphere, and the Middlelands festival outside of Houston in 2017. Here he had many years of material to go through; while I wasn't too familiar with the newest stuff, the set included the expected staples like "Atmosphere," "Never Sleep Alone," and "We Don't Stop," and I was pleasantly surprised he threw on "Be Still," which I remember listening to way back in 2006. After Kaskade I headed uphill toward the Sunday School stage...

This stage was called Sunday School. I've forgotten who was playing at this time, it was either Shiba San or Claptone. Like at most other festivals, I preferred these smaller-stage artists to the big names on the main stage.

The festival was about done for the night, but not for me. I had a reservation for an afterparty in Brooklyn at which Sonny Fodera would be spinning the tracks. To get there, there was a shuttle bus. Apparently I needed to pay extra in advance to ride on the shuttle and show some paper wristband to step on... but the person, probably a volunteer worker, checking for these wristbands accepted $10 from me to let me on board.

Most of the people on the bus were going to a different afterparty than I was, and the bus dropped everyone off there, a club called Brooklyn Mirage. Being unfamiliar with the lay of the land, I just called an Uber or a Lyft to take me to where my afterparty was, Quantum Brooklyn.

Here's Sonny Fodera playing his afterparty set at Quantum. This was a great set at a great club.   There was an opener on before him who was also pretty good, and the club had a better beer selection than the festival. I'm not sure how long I was in there but I know I experienced most of Fodera. Also I met some people in here who recognized my Electric Forest shirt.

When this night ended, my stay in New York City was half over. This long weekend, I grew to love this city even more than on my last trip two weeks before. Two more days of adventure awaited, but I wanted so much more time.