There are quite a few effective methods you can use to find what you are looking for. You can use maps to find places, city zines to find events, you can ask people what's going on, or you can use the internet. Granted there are large piles of resources available to us to find what we need. My method is a bit bit different. There are only two steps: 1.) Find someone who looks interesting, or is doing something interesting. 2.) Follow them to wherever they are going.
This method is much more successful than you would think and ranks, in my book at least, higher than any stupid fucking Droid app you're going to find. This is the method I chose to use when we reentered Brooklyn the following morning. Aside from being forced into a weird zig zagging course through town because a parade decided to show up and follow us, I did manage to find a girl riding a bike that fit the description of step #1. That is to say, I like bikes. Step one, complete.
Step two was a little it trickier. We were still in the van, and the girl had an obviously superior vehicle which could navigate much quicker and smoother than we were able. So I told Jon to hold on.
"Whoa, you almost hit that bus?" Jon said, as I swung the van around a stopped city bus and made a right turn at the light.
"Did I? how close was it?" I asked.
"Pretty damn close."
"Oh, I should probably watch out for that eh?"
I was sure if we followed this girl on the bike long enough she would eventually lead us to the riches of the Brooklyn area. Damn the stopped buses, pedestrians, and parades, I was going to stay on this bogie.
The method paid off. It always seems to work, at least for me, but I'm unsure if it's because I'll just wind up finding something interesting anyway, or if it's actually an effective means to find stuff to do. I choose to believe the latter.
So this is how we ended up in Williamsburg. We found a parking spot after 10 minutes of driving around which was, I would find out later, a more than skilled feat. So we parked, I talked to some guy sitting on a bench for 5 minutes and then walked around the corner where I saw a girl with a back pack. Time to make friends. In my mind, backpack = traveling, and we were traveling - that's common ground, so the math added up to: I should go meet her. I walked across the street, tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she was traveling. Turns out she was just in from Dubai, and more originally from Canada. Neat.
Her name was Gina, and she was in New York chasing pipe dreams, and also, more presently, meeting up with her friend Jonathan whom she met in Columbia (I think, somewhere in northern South America). We sat and chatted it up for a few minutes until Jonathan arrived and joined our make-shift street posse. It was a quick chit-chat, and then Gina was eager to drop her backpack off and rest a minute, and we were itchin' to explore, so we parted ways.
We stepped through Williamsburg for about an hour and a half. I was personally making my mental map and learning the streets and how the city was set up: it's a square grid, bleh, easy enough though. We made our way back towards where the van was parked, just to make sure we weren't in a tow zone or something dumb. Living in Kalamazoo has me in a perpetual fear that my car will be towed no matter where it's parked, and so I have to check the van at least 3 times in a single spot before I feel safe leaving it there for any period of time.
The sun was on its way down when we hit a large intersection in the center of Williamsburg and took a break to look around and figure out where we wanted to go and collect ourselves at. But no luck for composing ourselves. I turned around and spotted Jonathan and Gina marching down the center of the street trying to hail a cab and I waved to them, just as the managed to flag one down. Jonathan asked me,
"Hey you wanna go to a boat party? It's 10$."
"Do I want to go on a boat...yes... Jon you want to go on a boat?"
"Okay," he replied. All four of us packed into the cab and we were off to the lower east side. While we were driving across the Williamsburg bridge, Jon decided to mention he had never been in a cab before and was a little scared about the way the cabbie was driving. I told him not to worry.
"They're pros. We'll be fine," I told him.
When we got to the boat, boarding went fine. Jon got frisked, but I was apparently too harmless looking to bother with, so I missed a free feel up by a 300 pound barbarian, shucks. The boat had a full bar, a small buffet, a lower sitting deck, an upper standing deck, a DJ, and of course a full dance floor on the top. We skipped around the harbor for about 3 hours with love music, it was bad ass, and I don't think we could have said "I'm on a boat!" anymore than we did. At the end of the day however it was a clean awesome, no drama, nothing crazy just good ol' boat party cruisin'.
Afterwards we took a cab and went back to Williamsburg where we parted ways with our new friends and chilled for the rest of the night at Lucky Dog with Moonshine...but Moonshine is another story...
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