After bidding Aloha to Hawaii in the west of the USA, we set off for the for the other side of the country… New York, New York!
Our friends Ced and Avril were already in New York, staying with our other friends Kim and Damien at their place in Brooklyn. We arrived on Thanksgiving Day, so the airports were busy but there were no delays. We landed in New Jersey and rode to New York on a train which may as well have been a time machine, with its brown leather seats, wooden racks and conductors with conductor’s hats punching tickets.
Macy’s Parade is an annual event in New York on this day – you might have seen the huge character-balloons floating down the street. Ced and Avril were checking that out, but we were to arrive just as it finished at midday, so we had planned to meet them about an hour afterwards to avoid any huge crowds. We walked up the steps of Penn Station to street level and took caught our first glimpses of New York City. It was cold and raining, and perhaps because of that or perhaps because most Americans families were getting together for lunch, there weren’t too many people around. We put on more warm clothes, grabbed a map and found the street where we were supposed to meet Ced and Avril. We were about to leave when who should be walking into Penn Station, but Ced and Avril! They weren’t looking for us, and there’s several entrances at Penn Station, so this was just a total fluke! Well, that was perfect because rather than dragging our luggage around for an hour, we went straight to Brooklyn to drop it off and rest for a while. Kim and Damien’s place is in the basement level of a brownstone, consisting of two rooms, a small kitchen and a bathroom – small, but not cramped – they say it’s quite a big place for New York. They left it to us while they spend a few days skiing in Canada, so we only had to squeeze in four people, not six.
We had a quick sleep and before long it was getting dark. I could have easily slept on because I hadn’t shaken my cold yet – in fact it was feeling worse in this weather, but how could I stay in when the lights of New York City were beckoning? I rugged up, popped a Sudy, and felt a lot better as we headed out towards Times Square, bearing umbrellas and cameras. Well, I had seen images of Times Square many times on TV and in movies, but the real Times Square seemed much bigger, much brighter, much louder… and much more obnoxious. While I was amazed by the spectacle of it, I felt uncomfortable being a speck floating through a huge corporate tug-of-brand-recognition. No better remedy than a huge slice or three of New York pizza before wandering along a few more NY City streets and heading home.
Today, after visiting the local Brooklyn “café” where a latte is the same as a macchiato, we headed over to lower Manhattan. The Staten Island Ferry is free and frequent, so we took that over and back to get a view of the area from the bay. Dom proudly wore her hand-painted Statue of Liberty shirt as the real thing competed for attention.
Back in Manhattan, we fondled the Wall Street Bull’s parts, as many other tourists were doing, but it was our depraved explorations of its nether-regions which made me proud to be an Aussie! The rest of the day was mostly about admiring the architecture, and lining up to get cheap last-minute tickets to see a Broadway show. Later in the day we walked around the former site of the World Trade Center. There’s no mess there anymore, but the whole area is now just a fenced, secured hole in the ground. It was hard to imagine that this site once hosted those massive towers, but I’m sure the locals don’t forget. Across the road from Ground Zero is a building with a great curved glass roof which was smashed on 911, but like all of the surrounding area, now fully restored. The setting sun threw a great orange light over the courtyard outside that building, next to the water.
Later, we wandered past an Italian-looking cafe with an Italian-sounding name, so of course we went in seeking a good Italian-quality coffee, and we were pleasantly surprised. I may have even given an Italian-style gesture of approval.
Tonight we used our cheap tickets to see Rent on Broadway. The show was really great and the house was close to full, so I’m thinking they must do really well out of this, but at the end I was surprised at the gratuitous spruiking by the actors from the stage, asking us to spend more money on merchandise and donations etc. Maybe Rent’s rent was too high, or maybe that’s just the American way…
