Hookah-ing Up Astoria

I've become a cheap bastard in New York. My money supplies have been reduced to the point I have to put foreign currency and maxed-out cards in my wallet, just to feel like a functioning member of Capitalism. I've been surviving on pasta, stolen Wireless and cigarettes.
To save money, I've been hanging out in my place with friends and beers. A couple days ago, we decided to change things a little, so we went to a 5-dollar hookah coffee shop in Steinway Street, in Astoria.
The place looked like a run-down house. Some Egyptian men were chatting in there, and they greeted us as we walked in, smoke coming out of their mouths. "Hello," they would say, and as I asked them how they were doing, they smiled like fruit-flavored chimneys.
A man dressed in a yellow shirt, who looked like the owner, sat in the table next to us with his friend. "Hi, how are you doing?" I said, and he said he was doing good. He said he was from Egypt, and his friend recommended us the apple-flavored hookah, so we got it.
"So, why did you come here?" I asked him, and he started talking in what I presume was Arabic. I kept on smoking my apple-flavored hookah, letting the bubbles rise. No Arabic came out of my mouth, just apple-smelling smoke. I turned to talk to the people in my table.
As we were leaving, his friend told us to come back anytime. "We will," I said, and we stepped out into a street with parked yellow cabs and smoking coffee shops. I jumped over a few trash bags to get into my friend's car, and we took the expressway out of there.

Art in Harlem

On Friday, I was feeling artsy and cheap, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art with a friend. We meet a few of her friends there and we walked around, getting lost in art I did not understand but thought was incredibly creative and generally useless. After a couple hours, I was still feeling artsy and cheap, and when one of the new acquaintances mentioned the words "art exhibit" and "free snacks" I was immediately interested.
After a little nap in the A train, I arrived to a Harlem townhouse that was rented for the occasion. A lady welcomed us into the house. "Hey, I'm Narissa," she said, after a polite hug, "nice to meet you." The five of us proceeded to state our names and, with a very big smile and holding a glass of wine, she said "don't test me on this later; I'll let you go around and introduce yourselves to the rest," and left to mingle with the crowd.
I looked at the paintings by Raquel Ríos and pretended I liked some of them. I might have even liked them at the moment, after consuming my fair share of cheese cubes and wine glasses. When my friends were done eating and throwing grapes in my wine, we headed out. Narissa was there, and we said goodbye to her. "It was nice meeting you," she said, and we returned the niceties. "I'll see you around," she said, and none of us tested her on our names.

White Man in Chinatown

The other day, I met up with some friends in SoHo. Our limited budget and ethnic alliances ended up leading us to Chinatown. We walked and my friends were being loud and giggly, like high-school girls on Ecstasy, and eyes kept turning to us as we walked by. We made occasional stops at interesting shop windows, blithely blocking the way of people 5-times our age, stopping them from being functional members of society.
As we kept on walking, we passed an old white man -- the only one I remember seeing in Chinatown. "Stay in highschool," he said, "so that you can do something with your lives." I stopped walking and corrected him. "We're actually all college students," I said, "we go to school upstate."
Mr. white man looked happy about it. His white biker beard morphed into a grin, and he told me to then stay in college. His two daughters did, and now they are nurses, "so stay in school," he said. "That's some solid advice," I replied, and left.
As I caught up with my friends a block away, I thought, "This guy fathered two nurses: He must know what he's talking about." I mean, nurses are awesome. I've always liked nurses. They're hot.