“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.

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.