D.C

After Philly, we took another train to the nation’s capital.  We were there for three days and rather intensively bounced around all of its (mostly free) sights and museums. DC isn’t very big, and one can walk it fairly easily when the temperature isn’t in the mid-thirties and the air isn’t like breathing through a sponge. Both of which it was while we were there, but we still marched about a fair bit. 

The first night, we walked over to the Lincoln memorial from our hotel near Dupont Circle. We got there for dusk, which made for some dramatic lighting.

  

I will mention that the climate of D.C is particularly favourable to all manner of midge, mozzy and gnat.  I will also mention that that reflecting pool you can see above, which is next to Lincoln, is a really big body of standing water, alongside which we were walking at dusk.  So I was thoroughly exsanguinated by the time I took those snaps. Chan retrieved my camera from my desiccated remains and went on her way.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Monuments aside, the big things to get around are the various Smithsonian facilities. Well there is this, I guess:

The newer, non-burning version

The secret service are spectacularly poorly named, by the way.  They also look bored as hell.  You’d best not put down your backpack/umbrella/toddler for more than three seconds, because they’ll controlled-explosion that motherfucker in a heartbeat.

We did also get to the Capitol building (don’t tell them; they’ve been spelling it like that for ages now and it’ll just be embarrassing) where I tried to understand their system of government (Short version: Congress = Parliament; Senate = the Lords, only someone voted for them; Representatives = the Commons).  We caught a Republican rally outside, demonstrating against the most recent dealings with Iran.  Sarah Palin was there. Somehow Jesus and abortion entered the discussion. She sounded like she possibly spends her spare time driving rivets with her forehead.

Durrka derrrrr!

Back to the Smithsonian: evidently it got its name from a British scientist called James Smithson who bequeathed the yanks his fortune to set up facilities to spread knowledge and wisdom in that fledgling nation. Nice chap.  Anyway, we got around the Air and Space, American History and Natural History museums.  There’s a lot to see, but here’s some edited highlights. 

From the American History Museum:

  
Ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz; The original Kermit; Julia Child’s kitchen (American Delia Smith); Old containers from McDonalds that made me more nostalgic than I expected

From the Air and Space Museum:

 

  
A Fokker; An X-15; A brace of A-wasters; Nazi Germany’s best London landscaper; A Hubble

Natural History Museum:

  
The Hope Diamond; A massive Bird-eating Spider that plainly wanted to eat my face; A T-Rex; a cast taken from a Giant Squid.  Bit eclectic, this one.

We also took a night guided tour around D.C, which was insightful. But while we doing that, we found someone we recognised.  Back when we were in New York Penn Station waiting for our train to Philly, there was an issue with the incoming train and a certain amount of chaos ensued.  The Station Master, Mr Jermaine Jones, came down to the floor and reorganised the trains on the ground, shifting half of our train onto another route to minimise drama on our train, and get that crowd to their destination quicker.  He kept us all in the loop and got around everyone making sure we all knew what was happening.  All in all an excellent face for Amtrak, and many grumbles were averted. 

The man at work. Brit rail firms take note.

Anyway, shifting back to D.C: Chan spotted him in the queue for our night tour because my wife is terrifying.  We introduced ourselves and he was delighted to be spotted (even though he was travelling incognito for some ‘me’ time.  I suggested a false beard and glasses next time).  He insisted on a photo:

So that was a fun (if somewhat unlikely) encounter.
When we were done here,  we picked up Das Auto and resumed our journey on the road.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben ein paar Tage in Washington DC verbracht. Während wir dort waren, haben wir das Weiße Haus und das Capitol besuchten.  Das Smithsonian hat sehr vielseitige Ausstellungen.  Wir haben den Bahnhofsvorsteher von der Penn Station in New York wiedergesehen, der hat uns früher in unserer Reise geholfen. Das war überraschend!

“I like my toast done on one side…”

…said no Englishman in New York ever, Sting, you tool.

We’ve been here two weeks and we’re off to Philly tomorrow, so I’m just going to bomb-burst some things we’ve been up to in one non-chronological blob.  Chan and I went down to Greenwich Village and had a couple of drinks today, so this might be a bit rough around the edges.  (Edit- Actually, I started writing this in NY, but now I’m now in Philly and doing my very best to finish it off after five bottle of Sweet Baby Jesus.  Wish me luck.)

  
I  literally have no photographs where she isn’t holding a drink.  Please help.

We bought a couple of New York Passes before we got here (after a discount; Chan will talk about her cost-saving tips at some point) which gave us access to all things touristy, several of which I’m glad we didn’t pay extra for.

The Empire State Building

This has the  most duplicitous queuing system outside of Alton Towers.  You queue to get tickets, you queue to get in with your tickets, you get in a lift, you queue for the next lift (via a gift shop), you queue to get around the observation deck.   The view was great and all, but we’re glad we went when it was quiet and so only really queued to  escape the place.

 

Top of the Rock

Similar deal, albeit at night time: this is the observation deck of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.  Neither this nor  the Empire State had a bar, which I find offensive.

 

The RIDE

This was an odd fish. It’s a custom-made coach where you and your fellow passengers are arranged in benched seating, facing the pavement.  There are two hosts in attendance, who talk you through some irreverent sight-seeing and trivia while seemingly random members of the public break out into song and dance numbers. It’s definitely different and I rather enjoyed it. We only got the one-figured salute from the New York public once as well, which was surprising. Not sure I’d pay $150 for the pair of us normally, though.

    

Skyride

Or “Sky-shit”, as Chantelle has just shouted from the bath as I’m writing.  She gets a bit expletive after a couple: I find it’s best to let her wind down or things get ugly.  
This is a flight-simulator-esque video “ride” based in the second floor of the Empire State Building and –in the words of Gandhi- it is a thundering pile of bagshite.  Voiced by Kevin Bacon before that was sort-of ironic-cool, and featuring bleeding edge references to (and graphical samples from) mid-nineties video games, this was an insult to procrastination and exists only to draw people from the three hour queue to get to the observatory. Back in the sea with it.

Stolen publicity photo:  The people with their hands in the air wished to go to the bathroom.

Tours – Soho, Little Italy, China Town, DUMBO, Brooklyn, Midtown

We’ve tried to take some guided tours of most of the cities we’ve visited thus far, as they’ve proven to be both interesting and useful for focussing the rest of our visits.   We’ve been on three here, the first of which was around Soho, Little Italy and China town.  

  

Soho is the boutique shopping hub of New York and is remarkable largely for it’s cast-iron architecture, which features in everything New York based in TV and film you’ve ever seen. Little Italy is littler than you would imagine, having shrunk from 30 square blocks in the early 20th century, to a single street across 8 blocks – almost all of it restaurants and gelato shops. This is largely due, not to incursion from the surrounding ethnicities, but to the Italians making enough money to move somewhere nicer, like New Jersey or the Bronx. 
China Town was something else:  I’ve seen its counterparts in Liverpool, Manchester or -more recently- Montreal, but nothing quite felt like this: like a section of a foreign country had been air-dropped onto the neighbourhood.  It’s bizarre,  Our guide pointed us to a small kitchen/shop where an old Chinese lady bellowed at you to give her a dollar, and gave you five fried dumplings in return. They were fantastic.

The second tour we took was for the DUMBO area (which means Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, because Americans shouldn’t be allowed to name things) and the Brooklyn Bridge.  The bridge is interesting for having a wooden boardwalk, complete with park benches,  allowing one to stroll over.  I’m not sure it’s the family event it once was, but as an example of engineering and achievement against a background of official ineptitude and corruption, it’s first class.  The tour company got a bit greedy with this one, though, and the group was far too big.  This meant we spent 30% of the time waiting for a family of Spaniards to finish being Spanish in each locale.  Ultimately, we threw them them in the Hudson as an example for others of the non-anglosphere.

 

The other tour we took was around Midtown, looking at the major buildings, of which New York has a couple, in case you didn’t know.    The Chanin Building, the Chrysler Building, the News Building, the Empire State building: examples of gilded-age millionaire cock-waving all, but impressive at that.

   

 

The more public-minded developments like Grand Central Terminal ( not ‘Station’: traffic starts and ends there, but doesn’t pass through) and the Central Library (those of us of the same generation will only see ‘Ghostbusters’ when looking at its steps) are no less impressive.

 

 

Trufax: that clock is the largest piece of Tiffany cut glass in the world. The black brick in the second picture was left behind after they last cleaned the ceiling to show them what filthy fuckers they were, who presumably smoked sticks of unfiltered bitumen.   Also, they have alcoves in the station where you can hear each other across the room if you wish to look like a nutter bellowing at the walls:

Tit

We also did a ton of museums and art galleries, because we are classy. I’m not going to talk about them now because that might require thinking and I’m not presently qualified.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir haben all die Touristenattraktionen gesehen, von denen einige gut, einige davon schrecklich.  Die "Skyline" ist kategorisch Scheiße. Sehen Sie es nicht.

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.