Craig's Blog

# re: New York City

i was hoping to see a trip follow-up post (not a comment here)... ? i can patiently wait, just starting to wonder if anything was coming...

# re: New York City

We made it back in one piece. A very enjoyable trip, much better than I expected. A short summary --
We arrived late on Friday. The cabby who drove us from the airport to our midtown hotel was an ex-CAD guy from Jamaica. So I had a lively conversation with him about working in CAD. All the time I wished I could figure out how to end the conversatoin so I could gawk at the cityscape. Checked in and then took a walk up to Times Square which was a few blocks away. Wow, what an experience that was. Like commercialism on steroids. Unbelievable the lights, the people, the motion, the traffic, the noise, the energy. It was like being in the nexus. We walked out to the concrete island that Broadway splits and just stood there for several minutes just awed at everything. The next day I decided to try the famous NY bagel for breakfast. We both got an omelet bagel. Very good, and lasted us for the entire day (wunnerful what a high carb breakfast can do). We jumped on the tour bus and headed towards downtown. We had a great tour guide. Got to see the all high rent apartments along the way, the architecture, the history. Greenwich Village, Soho and Chinatown. Nice introduction. We jumped off the bus after they swapped our tourguide with some heavily Spanish accented lady. No thanks. Checked out the Brooklyn Bridge, walked into Wall Street and let Annette smell the money. Took a picture in front of one of Donald Trump's buildings. We walked over to Ground Zero. The city didn't allow any ads to posted in the area, no panhandlers, nothing. It was very solemn in a sea of movement. Pictures of the history of the WTC and a large plaque of the names of the people killed in the attack. It was hard not to feel a bit of sadness. So we marched on. They have two spots in town where you can pick up theater tickets for that day's shows. We just happened across one of them and decided on picking up two tickets for the show Movin' Out (http://www.movinoutonbroadway.com/). It's a play based on the songs of Billy Joel. $50 tickets for an on Broadway show. Seemed like a good deal to me. So we decided to walk back up Midtown and take in the sites. The city is just amazing. A friend once said it has a pulse. Very true. People don't dawdle, they move, get where they are going. If you don't move with the pulse you get pushed out of the way. Even grannies in sneakers have that attitude. Like a tourist buying a bagel, she wasn't sure what bagels didn't have seeds. The owner says, plain or egg lady. She finally decides on egg. The owner gets the bagel and says "yi yi yi yi..." in exasperation. Cracked me up. The energy is infectious, Annette and I really got caught up in it. We must have walked 50 blocks up to the Empire State building. Took a few hours, breaked along the way in little city parks. Very quaint, a nice reprieve from all of the concrete. I did enjoy Washington Park a lot. They had a fenced off area where people could let there dogs run free. Big fountain for the kids to play in. A beautiful arch upon entering the park. The buildings along the way were just amazing. I snapped many pictures which I'll add to my website soon. I loved how the old and new buildings melded so well. The detail in the old buildings is so cool. So we went up in the Empire State building to the observatory deck. Great view of the city since it sits sort of in the middle of the city. Got back to the hotel and cleaned up and headed out for the play. Great seats up front. For those from St.Louis, this theater was about a third the size of the Fox Theater. Great show, great music, dance, story line. Lot of fun. We walked around the corner and had a steak dinner around midnight with a bottle of french wine. It was a ritzy place yet the price wasn't through the roof like I was expecting. We walked back through Times Square. Saturday night in Times Square is just insane, it was double the people, movement from the previous night. It's amazing nobody gets hit by a car there. Sunday we took a subway downtown to catch the ferry to Ellis Island. The subway was really clean and I felt safe on it. You had your mentally disturb addict talking to molecules but I looked at them as entertainment. The subway system is confusing since they have several trains that run on the same line. For instance on the B line, train #4 may skip several stops along the way while train #5 may hit those stops but skips others and then train #6 is the express train and will go straight to Brooklyn. I could never figure out how people knew what train went where. No maps available. One lady we met on the train had a taped together subway map she said she got from a Best Western hotel that she claims is the only map that's ever helped her figure out the confusion. The only way I figured it out was when the train stopped I had to jump inside and look up on the wall to see the map for that train and see if the stop we wanted was included. Then I'd yell for Annette to jump on if it was the right one. Note to self, locate a good subway map before going to NY next time. So we took the boat to Ellis Island. Circled the Statue of Liberty. Amazing how close Ellis Island is to the city. I had the impression it was further out in the ocean. The immigration center is really a beautiful building. Nice museum there too. They had a picture of some of the immigrants who were refused entry and had to return home. The sheer loss in their faces was incredible. It was like robbing someone of their life force. Pictures of the children showed half of them looking scared to death and the other half smiling and laughing. We headed back and walked into Little Italy and had an early dinner. Sat outside and had a flirty Italian wait on us. It's funny how a big city like New York can have these little quaint "villages" that makes you feel like you're in a small town at times. Afterwards we left and got caught in the subway maze again. They closed an uptown subway train so we had to go up on the #5 so far then go back down downtown, get on the #4 train, get off halfway and jump on the #6 so we could end up at Grand Central Terminal. I can see the alure of just taking a taxi now. But it was fun trying to figure out how the hell to get from point A to point B buy going through Einsteinian spacetime. Grand Central Terminal was a piece of art. I stood in the middle of it with people going every which way and yelled, "what do you think this is, Grand Central Station?!" My mom would have enjoyed that moment ;) We got our cameras from the hotel room and hung out in Times Square and took pictures. Annette decided to sit down in the island and just watch everything. She said she could have sat their for hours. Like I said, you can really get caught up in all that energy. Monday morning before I flight we ran over to the bagel place and got a bagel sandwich to go. Different crowd than on the weekends. The suit and tie crowd. Now those were some people with a purpose, a timeline, a direction. Annette said as we walked against the tide of people it felt like we were salmon trying to get upstream. I really wished we had made the vacation one day longer. I really wanted to see Central Park and more of uptown NY. But next time. It was one of the few vacations where I didn't want to go home. I'm usually ready to get back to normal speed of life but I still wanted to be swept along in NY.

Let's see how did my expectations hold up?
1. Awesome buildings - More incredible than I had imagined.
2. Busy - Very busy, but not chaotic, with direction.
3. No kindness - The opposite, people were very helpful
4. Many people - True. Many different people that spoke different languages, dressed different, looked different. Yet they all were New Yorkers.
5. Massiveness - Looking out from the Empire State building I wondered if they removed all the buildings from this island I bet the island would actually rise up a few feet. So much concrete everywhere.

# re: New York City

Forgot one expectation - panhandlers. Almost absent. Hardly saw any in all the places we walked.

# re: New York City

good stuff - but you're supposed to _post_ this, not bury it in a comment. cut & paste it into a proper post & delete the comment, wot ? then just _link_ to this post, which will appear as a trackback here.

# re: New York City

Oh Lord, all of these rules I gotta go by....yi yi yi....

# re: New York City

aw, kvit yer kvetchin'