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.

So good they named it twice

As I’ve mentioned, we’re in New York. We’ve actually been here about nine days and since we’ve been too busy being on holiday,  I need to make some effort to catch you all up while it’s still in recent memory.

So, last Sunday we took the Adirondack Amtrak train down from Montreal to Penn station.  I wasn’t really paying attention when Chan booked it and figured it was about, what, three hours? Look at the map and ignore the scale like me. Guess how long. Nope, 10.5 hours. About the same as our flight out of the UK.  The route is very pretty, though, and it did mean that the bodybags could be dragged on without budget airline baggage restrictions compelling us to wear three pairs of trousers.  Chan has just told me it’s one of the world’s great train journeys and that I’m a savage.

We had read Tripadvisor horror stories about all of the toilets blocking up 2 hours into the journey, but our trip was fine.  Border control officers boarded after a bit and made everyone feel like an illegal for an hour (seriously guys, we just like coming here for the shopping; long term we prefer drizzle and sarcasm), but otherwise the trip was pleasant enough and there was free Wi-Fi.  I also made the mistake of showing Chan how to take continuous photos with our camera and now have 477 photographs of passing scenery.

   
This times at least 12 each

We got into town about 21:30 (9:30pm in local money; don’t get me started) and made our way over to the Ace Hotel - the most hip of the hipster hotels. All the staff have beards, wear braces and have Sailor Jerry tattoos.  I really quite liked it.  The rooms have original cast iron fittings and vintage furniture (obviously), there’s a stocked Smeg fridge full of expensive things I really wanted, the gym had a heavy bag, and it transpired that the in-house restaurant we used for breakfast has a Michelin star. 

 
It is perhaps a little insufferable

We dove out for something to eat and ended up in Madison Square Park, where they have a Shake Shack.  For the uninitiated, it’s a popular burger chain.  Chan remains unimpressed, but they sell beer and also show nutritional information showing how much healthier that beer is than their soft drinks. That’s something to take with you after eating 1200 calories of fried cow.  

 
The lettuce is one of your five-a-day, too

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir sind mit dem Zug nach New York.  Dannach haben wir in einem modisch Hotel geblieben.  Das Hotel war ein wenig unausstehlich, aber ich irgendwie gefiel es jedenfalls.

Montreal

We’re presently in New York, where we’re staying for a couple of weeks.  I’ve only a smidge left of Canada to document and we’re almost caught up.  To it, then.

We took a ViaRail train between Quebec and Montreal, as we were now without conveyance.  This was no hardship as they have enough leg space to sleep in and enough luggage space above the seats to house a family of four.  The free Wi-Fi was also better and more reliable than at the hotels at either side of the journey.  A  piss-weak Canadian dollar also made beer cheaper than water on your average Pendolino trip.

What this picture needs is less space, more empty cans of special brew and a couple from Bolton having a domestic

We get there and already you notice the differences with Quebec:  half the folk in the streets are speaking English for a start.  It is both generally larger and specifically more diverse, the rather large Chinatown being an example.  We popped in to this last for something to eat when we got there, as it was close and open much later than the rest of town.  

We were sat down brusquely and given a pot of Chinese tea, some menus and a waiter’s pad and pen.  We bemusedly ascertained, after a fashion, that we were to write down the item numbers from the menu and hand the pad back for processing.  We promptly ordered far too much in the tradition of my people.

Fucksake

We grabbed some mystery confectionary from the vendors outside on the way back, because when you’re being a vile foreign glutton you should go hard or go home.

  
Sweet dumplings and Dragon’s beard candy.  I don’t know either.

The town’s historic districts have a much more definite ‘touristy’ feel, but there is plenty to see, eat and do.   Most restaurants are French-ish, but there is also a European pub-type configuration featuring fairly heavily too.  They also have a Nelson’s Column, which we thought a bit amusingly unlikely.  In fact, despite the occasional contemporary threat to blow it up, the local French of the time gave not one blue fuck about Napoleon or Revolutionary France and saw the Man’s moment at Trafalgar as "a triumph of virtue".  So there you go.

“I see no ships…now that I’ve sunk them all…several thousand miles away…as you were”

The town also has no shortage of cathedrals.  These aren’t buildings that serve any useful function for me, but I’ve enough catholic heritage to know a good one when I see one.

 

What we then saw was……wait a moment.  Oh shit, they’re closing in.

“Soon”

What we also made sure to visit was the local “Biodome”, a zoo-ish facility where they have emulated five distinct eco-systems of the Americas: Tropical rainforest, Laurentian Maple Forest, Gulf of St. Lawrence, Labrador Coast and Sub-Antarctic Islands.   The climate and plant life is as accurate as they can get it, so it’s pretty interesting.  You do spend half your time trying to spot the damn sloths, mind

This one doesn’t count

  
This lynx is thinking over its life choices and drawing upsetting conclusions

This penguin is racked with existential doubt

This toucan stands vigilant against enemies, within and without

Comrade Beaver hates the stench of sedition and fifth column, and he smells it everywhere.

The same complex also houses a Planetarium, which we had booked tickets for later in the day.  To kill time, we went and watched Jurassic World at a local multiplex.  We watched it in French, as this was the only option open to us.  I don’t think we missed much in the way of dialogue:  I ascertained that the boss lady realised that she should stay at home and have babies (and demonstrated that heels are always appropriate) and that those children should’ve been eaten.  Being in French may well have added a modicum of sophistication to the proceedings.

I was worried that the planetarium production would be another dumbed-down travesty, like you’ll find if you ever go Madame Tussauds in London. That particular show is of such blistering stupidity that I came out of it having had several years of schooling erased from my brain, whereupon I promptly attempted to eat my shoes.

Fortunately this show was of some actual merit (voiced by Neil deGrasse Tyson, no less) and explained some of the phenomena by which we understand observable space, black matter et al included. Fun.  The other show was of a more traditional “local expert points at stars on the ceiling” variety, which I’ve always enjoyed but then immediately forgotten all constellations beyond Orion’s Belt on exiting.  We’re going to the other hemisphere later in the trip anyway, where all the stars are wrong. 

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Heute habe ich gelernt, das Wort "Planetarium" wird dieselbe in Deutsch gesprochen. Nebenbei: Gehen SIe niemals das Planetarium bei Madame Tussauds.  Es ist furchtbar und macht man doof. Waffenfähiges dumm.