Being a Tourist in NYC

This is the three of us making our way home from dinner at the end of day one in New York City! Do we look happy or what? I didn’t write yesterday at all, and that was because I was suffering from sheer exhaustion and we were all babbling about what we’d done during the day. We ended the day with dinner in a very nice restaurant (a tapas bar again but it wasn’t as good as the one we went to in Pittsburgh) We must have been fairly entertaining in our excited chatter as we ate at the bar....a patron AND the bartender kept buying us drinks and giving us special coffees. Thank you to Roy, the other customer, and to the bartender. We will never forget our time with you. We walked home down "Restaurant Row", stopped a total stranger and asked him to take pictures of us....and when we got to the hotel room....we crashed.

We planned to get up early today but even Linda (who is an insanely early riser) slept till 7:30 so we didn’t get out of our room till 8:30 this morning! Listen to me....like that’s late! But it is when there is so much to fit into so little time.

We started yesterday by going to Times Square and getting bus tickets to go on tours. These buses have no roof and they drive around through all the yellow cabs with a guide explaining the buildings and telling details about each famous building or store. It was incredibly interesting but cold. They are “Hop off Hop On” tours, which means they stop at designated places and you can get out and wander around for a bit and then get on another bus....they come by every 20 minutes. That ticket also includes free passes to get in to things like the art galleries, museums, Empire State Bldg etc. The passes are only good for two days though so we haven’t used them yet as we want to make the best use of them, and so far we didn’t have to pay to get into anything.

As soon as we had those tickets, we got on a bus and got started. We started with the “downtown” tour, which goes from Times Square and out through the different areas and past all the famous buildings. It winds through streets and is a great vantage point to see the city from. We drove past “Ground Zero” and the driver explained what that day was like. It isn’t a memorial at all. It’s a huge space in the middle of the financial district (which is all tall square modern buildings and very very upscale. I took pictures of the area from the bus, but at this point it looks like a major construction site with diggers and stuff behind the high solid fence. The tour guide said that the impact of those buildings coming down damaged buildings around them, and underneath as well.



I didn’t know it but the Federal Reserve of gold was in vaults under those two towers, and because it went down so far, they have to do major work to the ground to get it ready to put anything on after that. Really quite amazing. And I didn’t know either that the federal reserve is a pile of gold bricks that was intended to be backup financing for the country. When I asked why they don’t get it out and fix their economy I was told that it wasn’t enough anymore.....that they have printed so much paper money that has NO backup that they have even taken “legal tender” off the paper money and the gold just sits there because it wouldn’t even make a dent in the debt load. (The tour guide didn’t tell me that.....another passenger did when he heard me say to Angie that they should dig it out and use it instead of keeping it buried. )

Manhattan is an island. I didn’t know that either. And when I said earlier that they were “wasting” waterfront, I didn’t know either that the island wasn’t this big when the Dutch bought it from the natives for 60 guilders. They have brought stuff in and added land and the island is bigger now. In fact one tour guide said when we drove past a particular area that the waterfront was on this street during New York’s golden age, and has since been expanded and another burrough built on it!
It seems there is a lot of “gentrification” as the guides call it. Everywhere you go there are buildings wrapped in scaffolding and netting and they are being re-surfaced, updated or torn down. Some of the tour guides are older people who grew up in New York City and you can tell in their voices and the way they phrase things that they resent these changes. There is no “little Italy” anymore because Chinatown has encroached on it. Chinatown was somewhere we didn’t get off the bus. It is horrible and ...well...there’s no other word for it. And we really saw it too because last Thursday the “famous Hong Kong Market” burned to the ground. There is suspicion about it being a case of arson by another group of citizens is the way the guide put it. But the building apparently blew up, caught on fire, burned to the ground, and a tenement that was beside it fell into the ashes. You could see the top part of the tenement open to the sky, and there was a bent and broken bedstead on the pile of stuff being put into trucks to take it away. Because of all this, the bus had to detour from its regular route and I have to admit to feeling more secure up on top of a bus than I ever would on those streets.

From there we went past Central Park but we chose not to get off there as we want to take the time to walk in there and didn’t have enough time left to do that before the last bus would come by so we just watched it go by and stayed on the bus. In actuality, I have realized that with good shoes you could walk almost anywhere here as it’s actually only 2 ½ miles wide and I forget how long. But we wanted to squeeze in as much as we can with our three day bus passes and then spend Friday doing stuff we wanted to do and take the subway to it (like see Grand Central Station and walk in Central Park).



Another thing I learned is that “Times Square” isn’t just an open square. It is a square of streets and avenues that encompasses the theatre district, has a ton of junky souvenir shops, some very expensive brand name stores and some restaurants in it. The part we all see on TV at New Years Eve is just a little piece in the middle of it all and it’s being changed too. By the end of this year it will be all walking and sitting around space surrounded with theatres and HUGE billboards. There won’t be traffic going through it anymore, which is another thing the local people seem to resent and they call it the “Disneyfication” of Times Square.
And then there’s the billboards. They are unbelievably big. The tour guide pointed out the one for Budweiser and said that it costs FOUR MILLION dollars to rent that for a year. I nudged Linda and said “Now you know where all your money is going.” She laughed at that and agreed (it’s her brand)! Some of them are billboards as we all know them, just like along the highway etc., but even those are about 5 times as big as normal ones. And the rest are lit up and play films so they are constantly changing and moving. They are so big and there’s so many of them that it is like daylight in that area all night.

Arrival in New York City

The Colorful Plane!

 

I had trouble sleeping last night because I was afraid I would miss the alarm and then the plane! But Linda rolled over at about 4:30 and said “Gladys, don’t you have to get up?” and then she rolled over and went back to sleep! I couldn’t sleep anymore and lay looking out the window at all the tall buildings until the phone call came from the front desk. I got up, showered, packed my incidentals and was out the door to get the shuttle.

The black woman driving the shuttle was great. She was having a hard time with the person on the radio from her office who wanted to argue about how many people she had in the van! She eventually just shut the radio off and said “Aw juz gives her de confirmation numbers at dee end of da day an she can arga wid hersef.’ All the passengers....all from the Quilt Market, laughed at that one. We got to the airport in about half an hour, I checked in, got a cup of tea, sent an email I think, and then we boarded the plane. American Airlines....and it was a little tiny plane which when it flew over the city gave me visions of standing on the wing in the Hudson River. The flight was fairly uneventful.....I fell asleep and woke myself up when my head dropped a couple of times, but it was cloudy up high so I didn’t miss anything. When we got over the city they made an announcement about beginning their descent, which woke me up. I was lucky enough to be in the single seat on the left side with a window. The view from the air was pretty fantastic.....New York City goes for miles and miles and there are a lot of tributaries reaching into the land mass. And a lot of industrial businesses like oil refineries right on the edge of most of them! Must be because the big ships can get to them but it seemed a waste of waterfront! I was surprised at how many green spaces there are amongst the subdivisions. The residential areas looked like they have lots of little parks.
The airport is huge and the plane coasted for quite some time before it stopped and let us off. The photo above is a plane we passed during that tour. I thought it the prettiest most colourful plane I’ve ever seen! When I got my luggage, I bought a bus ticket for $12.00 and arrived at Grand Central Station about 12:30 p.m. The bus was supposed to go to Times Square too which is where I wanted to get off. When it got to Grand Central, (which didn’t look as great as it does in pictures but a few days later I realized this was the back alley area....it’s spectacular at the other entrance and breathtaking inside.)
The bus stopped here, a man got off and asked something. He apparently didn’t get the answer he wanted as he started arguing and waving his hands. The driver and the porter ignored him and he got on the bus and yelled at all of the people left on the bus that if they thought they were going to Times Square, we’d been lied to and it was only going to Penn Station. He stood there waving his arms and raging for a while and then got his bag and we all got off. I don’t know where he went. He disappeared. But a black lady in uniform checked with each one of us and asked where were we going and then said “jez a minit ... Ah be right back” and walked across the street and around the corner and in two minutes was back with a van. She loaded the four of us into her van and headed towards our hotels. Right to the door. She too was annoyed with her person in the office. She said “Ever tahm he on de bawd I’s got to argoo all day wid him!” Can you tell I was totally fascinated with their speech? I could happily have stood around just listening to people for hours, both in Pittsburgh and in New York!
She let the business men off at their hotels and then brought me right to the door of mine. Believe me....New York is everything they say it is and more. I commented on it and she said “Honey, you jez wait faw tomorah....dis here is Sunday an tomorah a ho difren stawry.” She drove that van like there was nobody out there and I swear was within centimetres (they’re smaller than inches) of the other vehicles. The intersections are gridlocked, she just pulled out and around someone who didn’t turn fast enough and cut him off. She says “Look at dat guy waving his fist at me! If’n he wan’t so dumb we be der awready.” Four lanes wide, yellow cabs EVERYWHERE, horns honking, and when there’s a yard opened up they step on the gas and go for it! Music blaring from all the flashing billboards, it’s incredibly different!
I checked into our hotel, which is clean but old and small, and certainly not in the same class that we stayed in at Pittsburgh. I settled into what will be my corner of the room, sorted out my stuff and then decided to go for a walk. (I couldn’t sleep...I did try to have a nap). I decided this was not some place I wanted to risk being out alone in the dark so I better get something to eat and drink before then. (There is no coffee or tea machine in the room! But, there are coffee shops all over the place down on the street.
So I went out the door and in a concerted effort not to get lost, walked to the end of the block, turned left, walked two blocks, turned left, and when I wanted to head home I turned left again, walked two blocks, turned left again and guess what! I made it! So since it was still light and interesting, I did the same thing over again only turning right. That’s when I found the street that was closed to traffic and a street market was going on. All kinds of the weirdest foods being cooked in the street.....all kinds of jewellery and designer bags, shoes and shawls , stuff like that.....everything seemed to be $2, or $10 or $20.00! It was very interesting. I took a picture of one BBQ ....I’ve been known to call Bob a hillbilly, but this one beat anything I’ve ever seen him do....and didn’t look to appetizing either! I’ll try to remember to attach a picture of it!