I’m a life-long Texan who has never lived in a city with fewer than 1 million or more than 4 million people. My wife is a Midwestern girl from a small college town. We are off on an epic adventure to New York City, where the same number of people that live in Austin probably live in one city block.

So far, all we’ve managed to do is take a cab from La Guardia to a nearby hotel, eat some extremely Hunan-style food, and sleep. This morning, I wandered around until I found a place that sells decent-looking breakfast (it didn’t take long), noticed that the lounge on the top floor of the our hotel remains accessible even when no one is on duty there, and gotten kicked out of the lounge on the top floor of our hotel.

Today, we venture into “the City”—for my fellow country mice, that means Manhattan—for more adventures. All of this will culminate in (I shit you not) the ICCA Finals, as seen in the movie Pitch Perfect. That’s on Saturday.

Here are a few photographic highlights from my Flickr album-in-progress:

– Our hotel in Queens is either very full of itself, is fulfilling a prophecy of some sort, or was simply named uncreatively. I like the middle option.

– We had dinner last night at Hunan House just down the street. I ordered the minced pork with bean curd sheets, which prompted the waitress to say “Really?” I took that to mean that the dish is very spicy, and I should be careful. She mentioned that it is “very Hunan-style.” If they were trying to warn me off of a spicy dish, they messed with the wrong San Antonian.

That said, it was really freaking spicy.

I did not know, prior to ordering this dish, that bean curd sheets, a/k/a tofu skins, are not the same thing as tofu. I would describe them as gelatinous noodles, or, as a Facebook friend put it, like eating bubble wrap. Still a good meal, though. We followed this up with dessert at Moon Cafe.

I also recommend the smoothies at the Grab ‘n Go.