Friday 20 July 2012

Noo Yoik

We had a 7am flight out from SF on Sunday morning (with added "please arrive two hours early"), and BART seems to sleep in until 8:30. Hence we decided to overnight in an airport hotel. A five hour flight, three hour time difference and hour on the subway into Manhattan swallowed most of Sunday.

After a quick rest we wandered out from the Park Central hotel and headed south in search of dinner. As we strolled past the bright lights, Clare went "tilt" again, just as she had early in our San Francisco visit, and needed pinching: "Wow, we're really in New York".

I have to say that I found that funny. We've hit South America and Asia pretty hard this year, but her head is turned by North America? Will I ever convert her into a proper traveller??

Clare says its the cumulative effect of everything catching up with her. I suppose I have to agree - after six months it does still seem unreal; I can't imagine what sort of dream it'll seem after a while passes.

We found dinner in a noisy sports bar, dimly lit and surrounded by big tellies on various channels. We were served by Irish-born Croydon resident Louise, who somehow seems to have managed to get a visa for a month's bar work. Good luck!

The next day was "Midtown day", apart from the fact that we started by strolling two blocks up and into Central Park. There I steered Clare toward Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon peace memorial garden area (successfully surprising her with it) and then stopped by Central Park Lake, where we spent a while watching terrapins swimming around until one climbed onto a rock so we could get a photo of more than just protruding nostrils. We left the park near the Dakota building, where Lennon lived.

Subway to Times Square, where I failed to find the exit directly up into the square to maximise the experience. Never mind - it's pretty great from any angle. A group of youths from Miami tried some soft evangelism on us, involving some photo-taking which happened to take place in front of a huge US flag shown on screens on the side of the Times Square US Armed Forces recruitment booth.

We grabbed lunch at a sports bar just off on a side street, where I had a corned beef reuben (when in Rome...). They had wi-fi and we booked online to go to the 9/11 Memorial tomorrow, something that hadn't worked several times last night. Flushed with success we looked at the various options to book Empire State Building tickets, with 86th & 102nd floor observation decks and "Express" (queue jumper super-power) an extra $22. Clare chose the full monty, which I wasn't sure we'd need on a Monday!

We walked there via Grand Central, which was well worth the stroll - a really impressive space. Arriving at the Empire State we were told there was a 1 hour wait. As Clever Clare had bought the Express on-line, we walked straight past at least five long queues, both up and down, that were no way as short as one hour. Wow!

The views were great, both from the 86th and 102nd floors, the latter much less busy and having a better angle, for example of Central Park. Win!

We renewed our Fijian late-afternoon ice cream tradition en route to our hotel for a teatime siesta.

I persuaded Clare to go for dinner down in Greenwich Village, and the subway outside the hotel got us there in no time. We strolled through Washington Park, beside people picnicking in the dark and a circle of people around the pool (fountain?), finding ourselves on a street of restaurants and bars with neon signs. We had an excellent meal, mine a seafood jambalaya.

We caught the same subway line just a few stops further the next morning; "Downtown day" in my mind, and a real scorcher at nearly 100F.

The 9/11 Memorial (logo colored so the 11 recalls the towers) is extremely impressive. The list of donors in the visitor center suggests a budget of hundreds of millions, but good taste has resulted in a solemn and moving monument, albeit one of the largest and most imposing I've ever seen. I suppose it's fitting, for the greatest shock to the American spirit since JFK's murder.

The water cascades beautifully down the sides of the twin towers' footprints, then moves gently to an inner chasm, where it slowly falls to eternity.

We went on, via refreshments and a spot of delayed blogging. Thence we headed toward Wall Street, via the picturesque graveyard of Trinity Church, where lots of people were enjoying their lunches in the tree-dappled sunshine.

Wall Street isn't, I discovered, named for the stone canyon formed by lines of skyscrapers, several in their day the highest in the city. In fact it's the line of the northern defensive wall of the old fort of New Amsterdam, which once filled Manhattan from here south.

By now we were hungry, but had to walk quite a few blocks north up out of the financial district before we found a salad bar to sit and eat. That wasn't far from Pier 17 where we saw moored tall ships. There we caught the M15 bus 56 blocks north so I could see the United Nations building, which I felt I'd missed last time I was here.

Well, I feel I missed it this time too - no flags flying and very plain. I'm guessing that flags only fly when the UN is in session, and only the flags of the nations in attendance. There were five minutes to go before closing, but there was a sign saying "no liquids". Since my shoulder had been breaking under the weight of the bottles we'd accumulated during the day, I wasn't inclined to finish by ditching the lot.

We eventually found the right bus back toward our hotel, where it was siesta time again ahead of dinner at a restaurant nearby. Strangely, my appetite deserted me completely after a moderate-sized bowl of over-herbed clam chowder - I don't recall feeling such a sudden change before. My linguine got a healthy shuffling around, but not much consumption.

We planned to use our final day in Manhattan to fill in some of the things we missed before, but it didn't quite go as planned. The day started even hotter, so the idea of strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge got shelved again. I looked into the Intrepid Aerospace Museum, on an aircraft carrier moored on the Hudson. However, Concord can only be seen on an extra tour and the space shuttle exhibition premieres tomorrow - those being the two things I wanted to see.

We did successfully get to the Rockefeller Center, where we had drinks and bought takeaway salads. We went into St. Patrick's Cathedral opposite, the beautiful face and twin spires of which were covered in scaffolding.

As we left, I could see dark clouds starting to appear from the west, already fairly close due to the skyscraper-restricted view. Nevertheless, we continued toward Plan B - a picnic in Central Park.

We headed for the great lawn, by way of the restrooms. We never got there. Rain started, and rapidly became heavier, and heavier, and heavier.

We were very fortunate to be close to one of the few buildings in the park, and even one with a wooden roof protruding around the side. We huddled under there as the water came down in stair-rods; truly tropical torrents, but prolonged.

The crashes of thunder included some of the loudest and sharpest I've ever heard. We had to put up our umbrellas to protect our legs as we sat on the ground, because we were gradually being dampened by raindrops splashing onto tarmac at least two feet away.

Eventually we made a break for the subway, fortunately only the equivalent of a block away. As we crossed Park Avenue West, Clare's umbrella turned inside-out as she had to run to recover her Sydney Harbour Bridge cap.

The downpour continued in midtown, as evidenced by the drowned and bedraggled tide of people pouring down into the subway as we fought our way up and out. We only travelled one block further before taking refuge in yet another Irish Pub. I watched the tense tenth innings of a Phillies/Dodgers ball game that went to twelve innings long after Clare's urge to get on had pulled us away.

Another early flight, so another airport hotel - this time at Jamaica, Queens where the subway meets the JFK Airtrain.

Around 8:30 I ordered an Indian meal and some drinks for delivery. A prompt an hour later yielded a 5-to-7 minute delivery estimate. It finally turned up at 11:30pm as we were just getting into bed, so was politely but firmly rejected. Fortunately some leftovers from our abortive picnic held the fort.

I guess it must be twelve to fifteen years since I was last in New York. The subway seems to have spread hugely. However, the biggest change (apart from the loss of the twin towers) seems to me to be in the New Yorkers. Last time I was here, I remember finding the subway quite a hostile place, where one studiously avoided catching anyone's eye. This time, on every single occasion when we were standing in a station looking confused or peering at a map, someone stopped and asked us if we needed help. Every time!

I'm a Londoner born and bred, who thinks London is the best city on earth. However, I can't imagine a visitor receiving the unsolicited assistance back home that we've enjoyed here, and in so many other places on our travels. My faith in our crown is shaken.

New York, New York --
A hell of a town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down.
The People ride in a hole in the ground.
New York, New York --
It's a hell of a town.

(For the film version, the word "helluva" was changed to "wonderful" to appease the Production Code offices - Wikipedia)

1 comment:

Merseymike said...

Always think New York holds the fascination it does because so much of it appears familiar from films and TV. Its that 'wow, I'm actually in Times Square' feeling

The subway has definitely improved - though whether it has just displaced the problems elsewhere I'm not sure