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Published: October 20th 2008
Empire State Building at dusk
You can just about see the statue of liberty in the distance - as a little pin standing up on the right hand side of the photo on Liberty IslandOK, so it's been a while since I've written a blog and I've missed out few blog worthy trips in the last 8months or so to various places including Vancouver/Whistler for my first time skiing and lots of trips to France including another skiing trip and a brilliant road trip around the southwest but never mind.
Here begins a quick trip to Honduras stopping off in Manhattan, New York for a couple of days on the way out.
Day 1 of this 3.5week jaunt saw myself and Laura up and about at stupid o'clock on my birthday to catch a ridiculously early flight to the "big apple". Fortunately, given that we were flying back a few time zones, I still managed to have a decent chunk of the day to enjoy for my birthday when we arrived. The disadvantage being that it left the pair of us shattered at the end of the day - and the next for that matter because we had to be up early (or so we thought) to buy tickets for a Broadway show that night.
Anyway, first impressions. Everything, and I mean everything, was exactly as I might have imagined the place
Harlem Street
The street where we stayed always had something happening to be. It's a place of tremendous contrasts with influences from all over the world.
People - It doesn't take long before you've seen people who are grossly overweight, ridiculously healthy, pretentious businessmen, incredibly loud and stupid or who have had way too much surgery. To be fair there are 'normal' people too but you just notice the extremes so much more here.
Food - Enormous portions of food in some places but small, neatly presented health food in others. In one place I ate a mountain of food consisting of half a fried chicken on a huge mountain of chips and a great big chunk of sweet cornbread - I didn´t even have room to finish it or steal any of Laura's food like usual. That wasn't even considered a big plate where we ate - one woman near us was piling through enough food to feed a family of 5 or six and I'm really not kidding. I also sampled a small, neatly presented seaweed salad for one meal and ate all of about 5 mouthfuls before I had to give up and put my fork down in disgust.
The hustle and bustle - The
Central Park
Amazing that in such a huge metropolis you can have a park as big as this with so much open space to do pretty much whatever you like. Aside from jogging there are boating lakes, baseball pitches, rock climbing walls and loads of other stuff! city really does never sleep, at least not when we saw it and we were out and about for all hours of the day except a small window between 1am and 4am when we were sleeping (we really didn't get much sleep). There are always people around, some shops I saw were open until gone midnight (Virgin, Times Square) and the public transport runs 24hrs a day (but isn't great compared to the London underground or the Paris metro)
The enormous high rise sky scrapers - Sounds obvious but they really are HUGE! From the top of the Rockefeller Center, looking down over everything, you can recognise what seemed like great big multistorey hotels or giant skyscrapers from the ground as tiny toy houses or average sized office buildings.
The manic pace of life out on the streets. Everywhere you go you're overwhelmed by the number of different things going on around you and the completely unrelenting motion of it all. Everybody is rushing around and the iconic yellow taxis fill the streets everywhere you go.
Anyway, enough listing things about Manhattan, here's what we did:
The first day saw us check into our
Sky scrapers
Even ones that would seem pretty big in most cities are dwarfed by some of the enormous ones you find in New York hostel on West 129th St, Harlem - chosen on the basis that it was the cheapest place around ($19/night, Jazz on the Villa) and actually, despite it's reputation, I couldn't have wished to stay in a better location.
These days crime is at an all time low and money is pouring in from all directions but that's not why this place is such a good choice of location to stay in. It's totally different from everywhere else in NYC.
The vast majority of the population is still black and not as well off as in other places but there's a real sense of community to the place, which I loved and is not what I expected from NYC. The first day when we arrived off the subway in Harlem and walked a couple of streets up we rounded the corner onto 129th, where we were staying and were confronted by a street closed to traffic for no other apparent reason than the people living there wanted to hang out together - children, teenagers, mothers, old people, everyone. A fire hydrant was spraying a cool refreshing mist straight across the middle of the road (it's pretty damn hot in
summer) for kids to play in and just behind that some young guys and kids had strung up a net across the road and were playing volleyball. Behind them a couple of guys were using one of several unrecogniseable boardgames that had been spray painted onto the road.
Along the pavements families were hanging out on steps and chairs gossiping or complaining about the usual things: A mother telling off her kid for clambering over something he shouldn't have been or someone shouting down from a window several floors up in the high rise apartments lining all the streets - these apartments reminded me of shoot out seens in movies where cops go flying up stairs and along corridors shooting at bad guys who then proceed to jump out the window and fly down the metal steps outside the building (also present here).
Elsewhere a couple of things that I remember bringing a smile to my face include a kid who must have been about 5 cruising the streets in an old pimped up toy electric car. He pulled up next to a little girl of similar age, told her to get in and then off they went
Central Park from the Rockefeller Center
Hint: You don't get this view from the Empire state building together cruising along like gangsters while mother and friend trailed behind trying to keep up. In one place we got off the subway at the wrong stop only to find several basketball courts all incredibly busy with full on games happening and lining the street outside the basketball courts were tonnes of chess boards, also all being used by young and old people alike.
The point I´m trying to make is that Harlem is alive and happy like no other big city district I´ve seen anywhere else in the world, so far, and isn't the horrible crime infested place of old that people think it is.
After chucking our bags into the dorm room of our hostel we headed out to Central Park, stopping for the enormous fried chicken meal on the way. The park is pretty amazing as it's SO big, there's no problem for space and you could easily forget where you were - even the relentless noise of the traffic is completely subdued. There are loads of baseball courts, miles of paths for people to jog on, boating lakes, climbing walls, big open spaces, shady places, museums, and much much more (sounds like some cheesy
advert!).
Later that night we had an appointment at the Rockefeller Center for just before sunset so we could see the city during the day and at night. It´s amazing to see the whole of Manhattan from that height at any time of day but to see the place change as the sun went down was awesome - I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. After that we took a walk around times square, which was out in all it´s glory during the night with bright screens flashing adverts in every direction you look and packed with people. It´s amazing but most of the people there are camera toting tourists like me and if you ever had to pass through there as a local it would probably get pretty tiring.
We were supposed to meet up with a couple of Laura's friends (Sasha and Gabi) from Paris but by the end of the day it was too late and so we put that back a bit.
The next day after only a few hours sleep we made a failed attempt at getting cheap tickets to go and see The Lion King but managed to score some great
The Rockefeller Centre
The best place to see the city from at any time of day front row balcony tickets (only $43) for another great broadway show - Spamalot!.
Later on we hooked up with Laura´s friends Sasha (+2friends) and Crazy (for she truly is) Gabi for some lunch where I ate, or rather didn´t eat, the previously mentioned seaweed salad. Then came the obligatory tour of the Statue of Liberty (me, Laura and Gabi) where we checked out a pretty good museum about the place inside the statue and climbed to the top of the pedestal but sadly no further, although you can see right up inside the thing, because of security issues since 9/11 and over inflated safety precautions because of the complete lack of fire escapes.
Later, after briefly meeting Sasha and Co again for dinner, we tore off to see Spamalot, which was pretty damn impressive but as with all musicals, for me it got pretty tiring and given the lack of sleep I´d had I proceeded to nod off intermittently after the interval. Which was embarassing enough for me let alone poor old Laura who had to be seen with the fool who can´t stay awake during a brilliant broadway show even when he has a front row seat!
Times Square late at night
The complete lack of sleep is really beginning to take it's toll by this point so we headed back to our hostel soon after this. Fortunately the show seemed enough of a distraction for her and she didn´t seemed to mind too much. I also managed to get a couple of pictures of the inside of the theatre which a steward asked me politely to remove from my camera and then put it away - so I pretended to and put it away - mmwahahahaha!
After the show we met up with Gabi again and had plans to see Brooklyn bridge but after an awful lack of communication (on our part it has to be said) with Sasha the whole thing fell apart and we eventually gave up and retired to our beds for less than 3hrs of sleep before we got up to catch our plane to Honduras.
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