New York - Subways, Chinatown & World Trade Centre

Subways The subway is the type of place where when you walk in a puddle and liquid flicks from your jandle and dribbles down your leg, you cringe at the thought of what that liquid might be. They almost smell as bad as the stairwell of Wgtn’s St James Carpark. Stale urine. On the 30 degree days the subways feel like saunas and there is usually nowhere to sit while waiting (could turn into a bed for a homeless person) We would be sweating wearing only shorts and singlets then look in astonishment as a man would walk past in full Jewish regalia- a tall black top hat, suit and full length coat. Grand Central Station is the exception to the ugly, dirtiness of subways. Complete with crystal chandeliers and restaurants it’s beauty is in stark contrast to the dark, smelly place that lies only a few minutes walk away.
In Brooklyn being white is to be the minority race. On one memorable ride, a black guy sitting in the corner with giant pair of headphones gave a rap concert to the train with every second word being an expletive. This was an R18 concert and he sounded really angry especially to the ‘white man’ and ‘all those b*tches’. As curious as I was of this misogynistic, racist rapper – I was too scared to even glance in his direction in case he ‘popped’ me! On 3 occasions homeless people came onto the subway and announced their state to the people of the carriage and asked for money. The reaction to this was as if they were invisible.
If you are into people watching, New York and the subways are the place to do it. I saw the fattest person, the skinniest person, the blackest, the whitest and the lady with the biggest pair of boobs I’ve ever seen. New York is a truly multicultural city. While we never heard another NZ accent in our visit (except when visiting Luke Weston from CPNZ) we weren’t unique. In the space of 5 minutes walking down a street you would hear a dozen different languages spoken from people all over the word. It would be impossible to describe the ‘average’ New Yorker. I was kind of expecting to see the Sex in the City types, strutting about in manolo blahniks, but they probably don’t frequent the subways, choosing taxis instead. The black people were interesting. Especially the women who had bodies I thought anatomically impossible – they have huge butts protruding out at such an angle that you could stand a can of coke up on it. And still, no matter how big, they could squeeze themselves into the tiniest pair of jeans and walk down the street with an air of confidence surrounding them so you just know they still think they are all that.

I found the subway system quite difficult to understand. The train announcers only added to the confusion. Their announcements about the train you were on and it’s destination followed by the standard ‘stand clear of the closing doors please’ sounded as though they were being broadcasted through a World War 2 PA system. Sometimes you couldn’t even tell if they were speaking English. So I was quite happy to let Warren navigate us. He did pretty well. We only took the wrong train once and ended up in a ‘less desirable’ part of Brooklyn where a couple of guys were negotiating a drug deal at the top of the stairs and low riding cars with rap music blaring drove past us slowly while their occupants glared at the 2 white tourists who had stumbled into their hood. Needless to say we got out of there in a hurry.

Watching the guys doing breakdancing on the streets or in the stations was always entertaining. I admired them for their skill and talent and decision to make money the hard way rather than stealing or begging. These guys were totally cut and had bodies that would make even the most dedicated 6-day-a-week gym junkies jealous.

Chinatown
Chinatown was a bustling, busy market area where again we were in the ethnic minority. The streets reeked from the fish markets and rubbish bags piled high along the footpath. There were lots of fruit markets selling everything from the ordinary banana to the bizarre dimpled fig thing. We walked around trying to find somewhere for dinner but all the signs were in Chinese. In the end we selected our restaurant based simply on the fact that it had an English sign in the window. $3 for 4 dishes, rice and soup – you can’t beat that for value. We were the only non asians in the diner and it looked slightly dodgey. I had to say it was a brave move for Warren who was still suffering the ill effects from a bout of food poisoning. But the food was delicious and we remained in good health – for the next 24hrs at least.

World Trade Centre
The site of the old World Trade Centre was a sombre experience. Large billboards told the timelime of the tragic events and parents read the words in hushed voices to children too young and innocent to understand them. You just didn’t get the extent of the attack until you went down there and saw all of the large buildings surrounding a giant fenced-off empty square. You feel the loss of the people at this location. The impact on the States has been much more than an empty square; it has been the cause of a complete change in operation of the country. Security now abounds. As frustrating and tiresome as it is, the Americans seem to understand that this is how it is now.

New York Shopping

Shopping was a somewhat bizarre and frustrating experience. For one shop assistants don’t fulfil their job titles and have little interest in assisting you. So you would ask the guy standing in uniform at the front of the shop, only to find that he was the security guard and also had no interest in assisting you. Every store that sold goods of some value employed a security guard. I soon learned to recognise them as the ones standing at the front of the store wearing expressions of unapproachable, utter boredom.
I also discovered a new concept in shopping. After selecting a cool pair of ¾ length jeans for the bargain price of $8 I wandered round and round the store looking for the changing rooms. When I enquired of their whereabouts I was told they didn’t have any. I looked at the attendant incredulously ‘what do you mean you don’t have changing rooms – how are you supposed to know whether the clothes are going to fit you?’ One look at the line at the ‘exchange and returns’ counter told me the answer to this question. Having been everything from a size 2 to 8, I wasn’t going to risk the guess so put my $8 jeans back on the rack.
Daphies and Filines Basement offered designer clothing at up to 70% discounts. After seeing the garments on offer my opinion of designers has gone way down. I have never seen such an assortment of hideous clothing under the disguise of ‘Tommy Hilfeiger’ or ‘Dolce and Gabbana’. Including shirts that should you be crazy enough to wear one you would disappear into camouflage should you stand in front of the curtains at your 1960’s Waihi Beach bach. I’m sure if you had a spare 3 hours or so you could filter through the racks of crap and find a bargain but I didn’t have the patience for such a quest. If a popular chain store had a sale you had to prepare yourself for mayhem. It would be hard to find any order in the racks. Size 1 to size 20, shorts, t shirts, lime green and black. They would all be there jammed up together and you would be in competition with hundreds of other women all scrambling to find a bargain amongst the crap. The queues to the changing rooms would go half way through the stores and even had me considering finding a quiet area where I could quickly duck behind a few racks and change. The guys queues would be much shorter but Warren couldn’t even be bothered with those and would just whip off his shirt right there. Guys have it good sometimes.

Having got through the stages of finding a piece of clothing that you like, getting through the queue to try it on and deciding to purchase your item you then had the checkouts to contend with. Some stores, like Gap, had a good system with 15 or 20 registers but only 1 queue with a fast-talking, unfriendly guy at the front directing you to a numbered checkout. The biggest supermarket I saw had 35 checkouts.

As you can probably tell, I was not overly impressed by the people working in the retail industry. It was probably the worst service I have ever come across. Overall, they were rude, unfriendly and unhelpful. Most of the time they wouldn’t even smile let alone acknowledge your presence. And don’t expect the girls at the counter to stop their conversation about what they are going to wear to Saturday’s party to telly your purchases. I even bought some groceries in complete silence – the girl didn’t even tell me how much it cost at the end. At another grocery store, as I walked up to checkout 5 where there was nobody in line, the lady at the neighbouring checkout saw me approaching and told me to go to number 3. Somewhat confused at this I went to number 3 where there was no operator and the girl at number 4 said her checkout was closing. So I went back to the original checkout and questioned the girl who seemed clueless about why her neighbour told me to change lanes (not that she was apologetic about it or anything).

New York Foods

You only have to look at the food on offer to understand why America has an obesity problem. I heard an ad on TV saying that two thirds of American adults are overweight. I thought that surely this must be a gross exaggeration, so one day when we were resting our legs on a park bench, we conducted our own non-scientific experiment by analysing the next 20 people who walked past our bench. Yup, you guessed it – 16 of them had had more than their fair share of pies! But what self control to be healthy in a city where you never have to take more than 10 paces between hot dog vendors and every corner has a pizza joint. Pizza by the slice is about the size of a dinner plate and is usually laden with so much cheese that there are puddles of fat collecting on the top. They aren’t too imaginative with their toppings either. You will search far and wide for a Super Supreme but Cheese or Pepperoni is always on the menu. Pizza joints usually double as pasta places too but by no means are these healthier alternatives to pizza as I discovered when the fat from my ‘filled shells’ seeped through 2 layers of polystyrene and paper. Fortunately for me fruit vendors were also quite common and funnily enough you never had to queue for these. Indian restaurants, which can be found in overabundance in Wellington, are practically non existent here. Instead there is plenty of Italian and Mexican. We tried a burrito from a place local to the Manhattan apartment. It was very tasty, pretty expensive and quite different from home. It was stuffed with all sorts of fillings including rice and you could barely wrap your mouth around it. And ofcourse in true American style, there was a nice, greasy puddle on your plate at the end.

After getting advice from our local New Yorkers we had our list of ‘specialist’ New York foods to try. A visit to Little Italy was definitely on the agenda and we managed a lunch and dinner here. The restaurant we selected for dinner was one of those semi fancy ones where they bought out 9 pieces of pasta elegantly arranged on a giant white plate. So we had plenty of room to finish off with a scoop of strawberry gelatti from a vendor round the corner which we ate under the shelter of our umbrellas as NY experienced a huge downpour complete with thunder and lightening. Our lunch restaurant was a much better selection. I had a vegetable penne, which lacked somewhat in taste but made up for it in quantity. Warren’s was much tastier.

Little Italy was a lot smaller than I expected but was still bustling with people. Apparently neighbouring Chinatown has slowly encroached upon its boundaries so it now occupies a much smaller area. Another ‘must eat’ of Little Italy is cannoli which neither of us were that impressed by. It’s a tube of crisp deep fried pastry filled with something that tasted like icing. Other oddly named treats were ‘Funnel Cake’ from Coney Island. Not at all like a cake, it tasted like donut piped into squiggles over the size of a lunch plate then dusted with icing sugar. Another New York specialty – black n white cookies were pretty average. They were like oversized cupcakes with chocolate icing over one side and vanilla over the other. I had my first pretzel that I purchased from an Egyptian street vendor who asked to go back to NZ with me! It was pretty tasty but the soft cinnamon sugar ones are much better.

Juniors Restaurant boasted to have the original cheesecake of America and all the locals we spoke to reinforced it’s claim of greatness. So when we were feeling peckish at 11.30pm one night we decided to wait the 30 minutes for a table to see if it lived up to it’s reputation (yes, you still had to wait half an hour for a table at 11.30 at night). Giving me a menu with a dozen sumptuous sounding cheesecakes and expecting me to be able to pick one is asking too much so I went with the waitresses recommendation of Devils Food Cake. This consisted of layers of chocolate cake, mousse and cheesecake topped with a thick layer of chocolate icing. I am a chocolate lover but this was too much for even me to handle. Warren enjoyed his burger and fries and commented that the chips were the closest he had had to NZ chips rather than French fries.

As previously mentioned, Krispy Kremes remained a firm favourite of mine but it’s a close competition between them and the cream cheese glazed cinnamon rolls of Cinnabon. I also rate the ‘cigars’ sold at many of the bakeries (croissant pastry spread with chocolate and rolled up).
Self service food worked a bit differently from home. Rather than paying the set price and piling your plate as high as possible, you would pay for it by how much it weighed. So places would be advertised as salad buffet $4 per pound or Chinese buffet $5 per pound. It’s hard to judge how much the food weighs you are putting in your container so you can get somewhat of a surprise when you go to pay for it.

New York -4th of July

America doesn’t do anything on a small scale so I was keen to witness for myself their 4th of July celebration. We were told that the Brooklyn Promenade would be a good place to view the fireworks so being the veterans of standing around that we now were, we arrived a ridiculous 3 ½ hours early to secure our spot, and even then we didn’t get the best spot on offer. A few other photographers were there too setting up their tripods and wondering out loud whether this was going to be a good location. Three barge loads of fireworks went past but not even the locals knew exactly where they were going to set them off from. In Warren’s words, waiting for the fireworks was what it must have been like when America or any other country was settled. The early people get the prime positions but then the latecomers squeeze into spaces that they don’t really fit and that’s what causes feuds, battles wars and death. It’s early, but civil war may yet break out, loud arrogant Americans can do that! He’s referring to the late arriving photographers who asked the girls in the best position if they would just mind moving so he could get photos of the fireworks. I couldn’t believe the cheek of this guy and agreed totally when the girls protested that they were also here to see the fireworks.

The Police presence here was worrying. There were cops in the subways, on the streets. They were directing traffic or just standing there. When 4 helicopters flew past the waterfront a few times, you couldn’t help but think that Americas Independence Day might be a prime pick for some terrorist activity and wondered if they knew something we didn’t. There were many forms of entertainment employed to pass the waiting hours, from people doing homework, playing cards, eating durritos and pizza, listening to ipods, playing sudoku and I even saw a lady plucking the hairs out of her chin with a pair of tweezers and a group of Japanese taking photos of each other while pulling funny faces.

After a few hours we discovered we weren’t on the Brooklyn Promenade after all but by then it was too late to move. At 9pm the first fireworks went off in a dramatic anticlimax. We heard the booms of the explosions and cheers from the people in Manhattan but could see nothing. After quarter of an hour of seeing a few sparks far away in the distance we were both pretty disgruntled. But then it was finally our turn. They were loud and so close that we got showered in a light dust of soot. However, my hopes of capturing the Manhattan skyline with fireworks lighting up the sky weren’t to be (except with the help of Photoshop as demonstrated in the top photo) and instead the foreground was filled with the ugly grey ‘Brooklyn Works’ building- as seen in the photo above.

New York -Coney Island &Hot Dog Eating Comp

Though only 30mins by train from Brooklyn, Coney Island was like entering another country. There were crowds and crowds of people, a lot of them South American. Latin music blared from stereos and you couldn’t hear any English. The people and beach umbrellas extended as far as the eye could see. People had set up their own food stalls on the pier selling mangoes on a stick or plates of rice and chicken covered in glad wrap (chicken in 32 degree heat with no refrigeration – fancy a dose of botulism anyone?) We probably chose a bad day to go, 4th of July is probably their busiest day of the year. I was grateful to be able to buy some chilled watermelon pieces instead of a greasy piece of pizza or cheese fries but after watching Nathans Hotdog Eating Competition Warren had built up an appetite for a hotdog. The queues at Nathans were astounding. A Nathans hot dog must be pretty good because the queue for one of these was probably 30minutes long in sweltering heat whereas at the hot dog vendor next door you could walk right up to the counter. (Those are the queues in the photo below).

Coney Island has been described as the poor mans Disneyland with arcade games, rollercoasters and rides. It was totally packed and the streets were a mess. Rubbish overflowed bins and spilled out onto the gutters. It was sweltering and sweat dripped from you when simply standing still.

While on Coney Island, we joined 20000 others to watch the ‘sport’ of competitive eating. Fortunately, most of the crowd were South American so I towered over most of them and got a pretty good view of the competitors stuffing their faces with American hot dogs. For a competitive eating competition, I was expecting to see a line up similar to what you might see at a Sumo Wrestling competition so was surprised to see the reigning champ, Takeru Kobayashi, looking like he would be more in place doing Kung Fu than Sumo.
The commentary to this event was as entertaining as the event itself, full of over-the- top cheesiness that had the crowds in groans and laughter. “Joey isn’t doing this competition for himself, he’s doing it for his country”, “This is the most intense and close competition ever to be witnessed in the history of man”. Below is the ESPN account of the events.

NEW YORK -- A 73kg wonder from Japan set a new record by devouring a sickening 53¾ frankfurters in 12 minutes to win the annual Independence Day hot dog eating competition on Coney Island.
The feat earned Takeru Kobayashi, 27, his sixth straight title in the event, held at the original Nathan's Famous hot dog stand on Brooklyn's seashore.
He broke his own record of 53½ hot dogs, set at the same competition two years ago.
Thousands of raucous spectators jammed the streets in front of the hot dog stand, a block from the famed Coney Island boardwalk, to watch the competition and Kobayashi -- a top-ranked eater who once ate 17.7 pounds of pan-seared cow brains to win $25,000.
His strongest competition was Joey Chestnut, a 220-pound civil engineering student from San Jose, Calif., who set an American record by eating 50 hot dogs during a qualifying tournament in Las Vegas.
Chestnut jumped out to an early lead in the competition, sometimes jamming franks into his mouth with two hands as the crowd roared.
But Chestnut struggled, red-faced, with veins bulging in his forehead, the Japanese star methodically chomped dog after dog, often dipping them in a soft drink before cramming them into his mouth. Kobayashi passed Chestnut with about three minutes left in the contest.

New York - Stomp and Salsa

Stomp Back in May, I had a flash of excitement when seeing a poster advertising Stomp as coming to Wellington. But we were to have already left the country for the date of the show. So I jumped at the chance to see Stomp in New York. Once we got as comfortable as possible in our midget designed seats with our knees up around our ears, we settled in for a great show. 6 men and 2 women from performing, percussion and dance backgrounds, made up the team of Stomp. Rubber hoses, kitchen sinks, dishes, matchboxes, brooms, dustpans, sand, pieces of wood, steel drums and items from a rubbish bag – newspapers, tin cans and plastic bags were their instruments. The music that can be made from something as simple a piece of newspaper is amazing. The whole crew were very talented and entertaining and I can only aspire to have 10% of the rhythm and creativity of these people. My favourite item was the opening piece which featured broom sticks and tap shoes and a guy did a solo to match the skills of Michael Flatterly. It made me regret leaving my tap shoes in a box in New Zealand. I also enjoyed the rubber hose song where the performers crawled along the ground with different lengths of rubber hose each hitting them against the floor at the precise time to create a harmonious and melodic song.
Salsa

The Taj Lounge lured you in with free entry, h’ordoerves, a free lesson and an open bar. But after getting on an uptown train instead of downtown then misinterpreting the address as 21 48th street instead of 48 21st street, we missed all that and had to pay to get in and the cost of a drink was more than our lunch at Little Italy where the red suited waiter grated parmesan and ground pepper onto your rigatoni.
The DJ mixed a wide range of sounds including Cha cha cha, Bachatta, Meringue, Salsa and Latin pop. Between songs he would pipe in with his reminders about the kitchen still being open or to keep partying because they would be open till 4am (this was a Monday night). The clientele was varied- mostly people in their 30s but there was still the dodgy old guy lurking in the corner asking all the young girls for a dance then pulling them in really close while they cringe.

I was already aware that they dance a different style of salsa here ‘on 2’ but I was still keen to see the scene. It was like being back in beginners 1 again – I felt like a complete tool with 2 left feet. It was OK if I just did the basic step but as soon as I did a turn I would automatically go back to ‘on 1’ and kept having to look at the guy’s feet to try and get back in time. Apart from me, the standard of dancing there was really high and I could have stayed for hours just watching (Warren of course had other ideas)

New York - Empire State Building & Times Square

Empire State Building
It was a good thing we were becoming veterans of standing in a queue as the queue standing reached its pinnacle at the Empire State Building. Annoyingly, we even had to queue to have our photo taken in front of blue screen so they could try and sell us an overpriced digital fake later on.

The viewing platform is on the 86th floor. It takes 64 seconds to reach there in a lift and your ears pop as you go up. We went on a pretty grey day where the visibility wasn’t that great but it was still worth a visit. It was a great way to get a good overview of the layout of the city. In the 30s the Empire State Building was the tallest in the world and now it ranks 8th.

Times Square
The craziness and mayhem that is New York is best summed up on Times Square. The noise is constant. A background baseline hum of chatter in 200 different accents and languages overlaid with the chants of street vendors. Cars honking and siren squealing past every 5 minutes provide the accents to the orchestra of Times Square.
The smell is ever-changing but constant, depending on the cuisine of the nearest vendor. It could be the burnt salt and smoke of a pretzel stand or the spiced shish kebab of a halaal stand. You are forced to walk in such proximity to people that this adds another dimension to the smells of Times Square. If you are lucky, you will get whiffs of the latest Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein perfume but being there in hot, muggy weather meant the odours were more along the lines of ‘eau de B.O’. Walking along the shop fronts provided some relief to the mugginess as chilly air conditioned air would spill out every time someone opened a shop door. Visually, Times Square is up there with Vegas. There are so many flashing billboards and coloured neon lights commanding your attention that your eyes dart around madly, trying to take it all in. But your focus is needed simply for walking- weaving in and out of crowds and trying to find a gap in the pedestrian traffic to dart into a shop. In popular hot spots where people gathered to watch an artist create a spray painted landscape of the Manhattan Skyline or scrambled over $5 designer sunglasses, you would have to forgo the footpath and walk on the road. Union Square offered some landmark shops. There was the world’s largest shop (Macy’s) and a 3 Storey ‘Toys R Us’ which even had a giant Ferris wheel in it.

New York - Statue of Liberty (27 June)

The extent to which Sept 11th has affected America becomes evident when visiting such places as the Statue of Liberty. We all qued for the ubiquitous security checks, bag check and walk through the metal detector before getting on the ferry to get to Liberty Island. Once on the island you qued for another hour to go through more security checks to be able to go up to the Statue. This time we had to walk one by one into a little cubicle and stand on an assigned spot while several jets of air sprayed at you. Watching the yellow skirt blow up on the bearded she-man in front of us was not pleasant! I assume this was some kind of explosives residue check. Even with all the checks, there were still several heavily armed park policeman patrolling the grounds.

Once done with all the security, (and more queuing to use the lifts) the statue was pretty cool. A lot bigger than I expected, the index finger alone is taller than a person. There was a museum where we learnt some interesting things, like the statue is actually made of copper and has gone green with oxidation and that the Statue’s designer also had plans of building a giant naked man straddling the Suez Canal! The photo above of Warren standing next to the foot is an actual sized replica of the Statue and is what it would have looked like when first built.
The photo to the right is the tour guide telling us all about the original torch which she is standing in front of. The gold torch of today has only been in use for the last 10 years or so.

Nobody is allowed up the statue anymore, we could only go to the top of the pedestal but you could look up inside and see all the steel rods holding it together. The internal engineering designwork was done by the same guy who did the Eiffel Tower.

New York- Gay Pride Parade 25th June

Our shuttle dropped us off on a main street and pointed to our hotel down a dodgey side street of Chelsea. With 2 suitcases, 2 backpacks, a camera bag and laptop we staggered our way through a street where tatty clothes for sale lined the footpath and an old Chinese man relieved himself against the corner of a building Welcome to New York!

We were only in Chelsea for one night. Our next place of residence was in Manhattan in the Spanish Harlem area which is made up of mostly Puerto Rican and Dominica Republic Spanish speaking people. The Projects are just across the street but it’s great as the Subway is really close. We stayed with my sister Malia’s friend, Anika, who she used to work with at a hospital in the US. Anika is married to Hugh who is finishing his anatheasology qualification and they have 2 kids Milo (4year old daughter) and Otto (2 year old son). Otto has so much energy and he runs around the apartment with a cheeky smile on his face all of the time. Milo is a lot calmer and she was a lot of fun to talk and play with. Otto and Milo found a friend in Louise as she would get things for them. It was great fun staying with them especially as Hugh brought home Krispie Kreme’s for Louise twice. She was so excited that she wore the hat that Hugh brought home from the store. (Note from Louise - while ofcourse I was excited by Krispy Kremes, Warren made me wear the hat then took a photo when I was deeply engrossed in conversation)

Our first day in New York we saw the Gay Pride Parade. No – we didn’t plan our dates in NY to include gay pride week, it was just a coincidence. I have never seen so many middle aged white bodies bulging out of tiny g strings. Hideous! Warren reckoned the Sydney gays were much more impressive. At least the end of the parade had 2 very fine washboard abbed models that were a lot easier on the eye. It was interesting to see the different groups parading- everyone from gay friendly churches to gay seniors. There were heaps of people there but our section of audience was somewhat subdued. It started raining so we put up our rainbow spotted umbrella and suddenly we were popular. After about 2 1/2 hours of parade watching we even came away with a pocketful of fluorescent green, mint-tingle Trojans!