This morning i was rushed.  I'm always early (as i've stated before) so this morning i thought ' i can leave my apartment at 8:45 and get there by nine'.  Turns out it works... i got there at 9 on the dot but me in my 'must be on time' mindset was freaking out the whole time.  Probably won't try that again.  I arrived at work a little flustered.   Almost immediately Greg (if you don't remember that's the guy that hired me and who i consider to be my boss... i have a lot of bosses) asked if i wanted to go on a shoot.  Uhhh of course.  So i ran downstairs to meet Josh Haskell in the field producer's office.    
      We were covering a city council meeting at city hall about a bill a council woman is trying to pass concerning counterfeit bags.  We grabbed a taxi and headed there.  It took about thirty minutes and we were there.  We showed our credentials  at the front and headed up to the room where the meeting was being held.  It was tiny and we were the only TV press there.  This was especially odd because we were late... some local affiliate showed up later and what appeared to be Asian American broadcast students but that was it.

      The bill she was trying to pass wants to penalize not only the vendors of counterfeit goods in New York but the buyers as well.  Penalties could be as severe as one year in prison.  We shot a mass majority of the seemingly never ending meeting.  Josh had to leave because they decided to make it a package and he had to take calls from correspondents and the producers for World News.  Since he was gone, i got to run the camera!  It was pretty cool knowing i was shooting something that could air in World News.  Josh really let me have a hand in the whole process.

      We did a few interviews after the meeting and then we headed to China Town to get some b-roll of the vendors.  Our cab driver was quite the character.  I think Josh made him a little mad because he wasn't having the typical taxi driver trick of taking longer routes.  For the rest of the ride, the driver was grilling Josh about NYC facts such as how long is broadway street... why is it called canal street... blah blah blah.  I got one answer right so clearly i'm an expert now haha.
      It was raining today so vendors were scarce in China Town.  Josh asked me to go act like i was shopping in a few stores to see if any of the purses were fake.  Most of the shops were very nervous about it.  If you've ever been in one of those shops, they have very obvious fake handbags.  Things that look like Coach but with G's, Louis Vuitton's with two L's instead of a V, etc.  So they, for the most part, told the truth and said they were not designer.  Except for one.

     I walked into one kind of discouraged and was snapping a picture of some knock-off Louis Vuitton luggage.  You aren't supposed to take pictures so when the shop owner walked up behind me, i hid my phone and picked up the bag nearest me.  It was a fake Coach bag.  She, in her very heavy asian accent, said "you want coach".  I said "Well i've never bought a coach bag outside a department store.. are you sure it's real?" "Yes, Yes. It Coach. You buy?" I was a tad flustered that i actually found a liar so i stupidly said, "Well let me go find my dad and see if he'll buy it for me." On a side note, Josh is maybe 4 years older than me and looks nowhere near old enough to be my dad.  I just didn't expect her to follow me out... which she did.  Josh said we'd think about it and he wanted to buy it for my birthday but we had to meet some friends first.  Then we walked away.
      At this point we were waiting for Lindsay Davis and a WN producer.  Once we found them, we walked back to the shop.  Here's the video of what happened when we walked in:

     So... change of story.  We went in a few more shops but figured we'd have better luck with the typical stands you think of with this sort of thing, rather than the shops we had been exploring.  So we took a cab to SoHo to see if they had any stands.  Nothin.  We ended up walking all the way back to China Town and splitting up.  Lindsay and the producer went to see if they could get a store.  Josh and I got man on the street interviews. 

      Once we had finished, we headed back to log the footage and get it to an editor in time for World News.  Pretty cool to watch something you saw being made on national television.  I would also like to point out that Josh was like the best person to go on a shoot with.   He let me help so much and thanked me for being helpful, which of course made me feel great! I'm going to Newtown for the 6 month anniversary coverage tomorrow with him and the other producer i went on a shoot with earlier this summer.  I'm very excited, though, it's going to be rainy and i don't exactly own a lot of rain gear! Wish me luck!