The Bronx is up and the Battery's Down...

The last 10 days have been spent in NYC.  10 days in one place is the longest we'll be in any one place on this trip, so this will be a pretty long summary.  We stayed with Tash's cousins in Long Island which was great, "commuting" into Manhattan every day to do stuff. 

First impressions were that New York is nowhere near as grimy and unpleasant as we expected it to be - we didn't get mugged or murdered once!  In fact the whole city seems quite nice, considering that once you get that many people in such a small area you're bound to get lots of crazy people and mess.  Tash compared it with India - lots of honking and rubbish in the street (no cows though).  However it tends to be the kind of place you can overlook these things because of the neon (and other interesting sights, e.

g. the giant neon Hershey's sign, and an entire multistorey building devoted to m and m's...).

We were there for 10 days and even then barely scratched the surface of the city.  The biggest highlight for us of Times Square was the giant Toys R Us!  But what else did we do...

Well, we went to a Letterman taping (missed Bruce Willis who was in the previous show filmed that morning, but we did get to see Morrissey, who had the most strangely dressed backing singer in the world, who sang 5 notes and that was her job done for the whole song!).  We went and saw Les Miserables, or as the Americans like to call it "Les Miz".  A really good production although a couple of the principal characters were not as good as I would have expected for Broadway.   We also went to see "Stomp", and got caught in a huge thunderstorm on the way back from the theatre (bear in mind it had been clear skies and 30 degree temperatures up until this point).  Fortunately there were many shops selling umbrellas for $4, which meant that we only got slightly drenched, rather than totally drowned...

Apart from going to shows, we spent a lot of time in the museums and galleries, including the main drawcards like the Met, the Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art (which was great, even though Dali's "persistence of memory" was out on loan).  The famous artworks and artists are as common as hot dog stands on the NY sidewalks (what, another Renoir?).   We also went to a couple of smaller galleries like the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in Greenwich Village.  

Apparently NY is all about shopping - well, yes and no.  We wandered around SoHo, NoHo, the Village, Midtown and 5th avenue.  Sure, there is a lot to buy, especially if you want 7 "I love NY" t shirts for $10, but to be honest, I can think of better things to spend my money on.  And I can definitely think of better things to spend my money than $1076.12 for a hoodie (yes folks, I found a hoodie for over one thousand bucks!!!!).  They do have some awesome music shops though, and once again I found it very depressing that I can't carry a 40kg speaker cabinet, 2 basses and half a dozen guitars around for six months (and yes, it would be too hard to sneak them into Tash's pack...). As well as Toys R Us, there is also the equally impressive FAO Schwarz, a toy shop that sells stuffed giant Woolly Mammoths for $12500, over 20 different versions of monopoly, and where you can buy yourself a giant floor keyboard (only $250000)

As far as major tourist drawcards, NY has it all.   The NY public library (as seen in Ghostbusters), 55 Central Park West (as seen in Ghostbusters), and Central Park (as seen in Ghostbusters).  Oh yeah, we saw some big green statue in the harbour as well (which was in Ghostbusters II).  Actually speaking of the stature of liberty, I'll share with you a typical example of Americanness we discovered on the tour.  After years of planning, design and construction by the French to deliver the statue to the USA, what did the Americans do?  They decided that simply being a statue representing liberty, freedom and justice wasn't enough, but it needed to "do" something, so they cut most of the metal out of the torch to try and put lights in it.  This resulted in killing hundreds of birds drawn to the light, allowing water in and causing the statue to corrode from inside, and not actually doing anything useful.   I suspect that if it were built now (yeah, like the French would give the Americans a statue representing freedom nowadays...) the Americans would try and put a motor in it, or make it poseable.  "Yeah hon, it's great, but what does it do???".  And seriously, some of the questions these people ask!  After the tour guide explained the symbolism of the torch, the crown, the tablet in her left hand and the fact that the statue is "moving forward", the next three questions from the crowd were "what does book in her hand mean", "why is she moving forward" and "how do they clean it".  The answer was, they don't clean it, and I knew that, because the tour guide had just finished explaining that too...

We also went to Ellis Island, the Empire State building (didn't go up but went up the Rockefeller building instead), the former WTC site (soon to be the site of the "Freedom" tower, which could equally easily be called the penis tower judging from the plans. ..), the NY academy of medicine, the Guggenheim (which is currently wrapped in scaffolding and consequently is much less interesting than usual) as well as "strawberry fields" and the nearby Dakota Building (where John Lennon was shot). 

NY people are reputed to be rude - many of them are, but probably for good reason (you won't get anywhere if you're polite to everyone!).  For example the following exchange noted in the subway:

Man 1 is blocking the only walkway on a narrow subway platform eating a slice of pizza.  Man 2 walks     past, elbowing man 1 out of the way while saying "excuse me" (in NYC "excuse me" means "I'm going to push you out of my way but I don't want to seem rude or apologetic").   Man 1 says "you f$*!ing asshole", Man 2 says "I said excuse me, you didn't get out of the way" Man 1 says "How about I kick your F$%!ing a$# you F%*^ing A#^hole!".   The impressive thing is, neither of them stopped what they were doing: Man 1 continue to eat his slice of pizza, Man 2 kept walking without slowing down or looking back.

So, tips to travellers to the city: Expect to get checked by security every time you go to anything, don't eat at the cafeteria of museum of natural history, book for the statue of liberty well in advance (or like us you'll miss being able to go inside the statue), spend some time just wandering around, go shopping on 5th avenue only if you have lots of luggage space and deep pockets, and expect people to be rude as hell, but politely so.   The pizza is great, the cheesecake better.  Get used to lining up for tourist attractions and paying for the privilege.  And the cookies they sell at the Met cafeteria are the best I've ever eaten... 

I think that's all I've got to say about New York.  Oh, they have awesome funk bands busking in the street, and no one bats an eyelid if you start singing Sinatra at random tourist attractions.      

Next - Washington DC for the 4th of July!