Where Brooklyn at?

The day after our night in town, we travelled across the river to find the digs we’d rented off AirBnB in Brooklyn.  Our street was off Malcolm X boulevard and was broadly as you are imagining.  I fit right in.  One reason we stayed out there was as a bit of a cost saving measure as we thought we could cook a few meals ourselves.  The first attempt was a bit of a failure on the cost front as we realised that the local shops only sold junk food and ammonia, meaning we ended up travelling into town for some groceries.  Chan took us to Dean & DeLuca, against whom Waitrose are Aldi.  Once I’d parted with my choicer organs and promised any future children into indentured servitude, it was a nice meal that we had, after we got ourselves lost on the metro and back into the ‘hood a couple of hours later.

A couple of days into our time in NY, two very good friends of ours, Saffy and James, came across for a visit.  I knew about it but Chan didn’t.  So that was a lovely surprise for her and it was great to see a couple of familiar faces.

 

Together we all took the ferry across to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis island, because that’s what you do.   It certainly is impressive, and the story of its construction is interesting: The whole statue was constructed in Paris prior to being shipped across, making it a popular landmark in France for the years it spent there.  Indeed, the ‘Lady in the Park’ spent a fair while over there waiting for the Americans to fulfil their end of the bargain: namely, building the pedestal to stick it on.  The excerpts in the museum show how the contemporary press was not kind toward the venture nor towards the vacillation about its funding.  Obviously, once it turned up, every bugger ended up stealing its image for everything from newspaper logos to tinned fruit.

  
 

Ellis Island was fascinating.  The museum explores immigration to the US generally and the use of the island as an immigration processing centre specifically.  It was all the more interesting as Chan and I had previously visited the Emigration museum at Bremerhaven in Germany, which, rather neatly, had a mock up of Ellis Island in its exhibits.

  

The stories of migrant people facing xenophobia and bureaucratic stupidity through knee-jerk populist restrictions have obvious modern parallels, but it was the recording of the lady in her nineties crying about her grandmother being sent home (because of a small growth on her finger), never to be seen again, which stayed with me.  
Maybe our modern day xenophobes will be on the right side of the argument, but history doesn’t lend them much in the way of empirical weight.

Remind you of anything?

On a lighter note, we all went down to Brooklyn Park to watch an open-air screening of Die Hard.  The atmosphere was fun, with the locals whooping and cheering at every famous quip/retort/baddie offing, and there was a big cheer for Sgt Powell learning how to shoot people again. Yippee ki aaye.

 

And the view of town at night time was pretty.

(Nicht so)Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir leben in Brooklyn im Moment. Es ist sehr real. Zwei Freunde sind nach Amerika um uns zu besuchen gekommen (Ich brauche vielleicht ein bisschen hilf mit diesem satz).  Wir haben die Freiheitsstatue und Ellis Island besucht.  Früher haben meine Frau und ich das Museum in Bremerhaven besucht, und so haben wir das Ellis Island Museum noch interessanter gefunden. Die gleiche Thematik von Fremdenfeindlichkeit sind jetzt relevant. Wir haben auch ein Open-Air Auftritt von Die Hard angeschaut. Wir haben es toll gefunden.