Get down to Yankee town

They will stick flashing lights on anything in New York City.


We have now finished jam-packed week in NYC. We have walked nearly enough to cope with the tubs of frozen yoghurt, mountains of muffins, small plots of land known as pepperoni pizza slices and even a full American sized soda (survived once, not pressing our luck by trying it a second time). This is some of what we saw on our travels.

Here is the mighty Brooklyn Bridge, in its day the longest suspension bridge in the world and the tallest structure in New York.

Once you are off the bridge you get this view back over Manhattan.

It is but one example of how abruptly things change in New York. The Upper East Side (home of the Robber Barons such as Vanderbilt and Gould and Charlotte from Sex and the City) is literally only a street away from Harlem, where dawgs pop caps at each other and schools are rewarded for keeping windows in tact for a full school term. Equally, Brooklyn is very much a different place to Manhattan. Very suburban, and nowhere near as developed. By about 3 blocks in, instead of fashionistas you have drunk minorities crowding around subway entrances talking rubbish.

The financial district also has the odd surprise. Here is the NY Stock Exchange, as close as we could get.

Which was also the site of a Romanian festival one Saturday.

The highlights being the last sun we saw while in NYC and also gigantic cupcakes.

Back in Brooklyn we did the suburban thing of watching some Little League baseball. We had to scurry off to the 15 year old match. We wanted to watch the desparately cute under 6's but Matt was being eyed off by the Moms as if he were a predator so we couldn't stay long.

We mentioned Harlem a moment ago. It is on the North-Eastern edge of Manhattan and very much a home for persons of the African American persuasion, a persuasion seen only rarely in the uber-posh suburb just near it.

It is a lovely place. Family fun days of cycling early in the morning.

Stately "brown-stone" homes built before the middle class made a mad dash for New Jersey.

Jazz and street art.

Religious worship at the "African Mother Methodist Episcopal Zion Church" (a group that doesn't quite seem to know what it believes in - the priests' garments have zulu trim, with Egyptian ankhs on their chests, give prayers in support of the supremecy of the Catholic Church, and wave and sing and do those things that tourists love to see).

And drive by shootings. Read very carefully. Three dudes gunned down at the very place we were waiting at the lights. We took solace though in the knowledge that the gangsters are terribly bad shots.

Having escaped from Harlem, we went Jewish, back to Katz's deli. Here is the site of the famous Meg Ryan orgasm scene.

Here is a $20 pastrami on rye. Note the celery flavoured soda pop in the background - another bad food decision from Matt.

And here is a little girl with a very big job ahead of her.

We followed this up with cheesecake ... and apple pie ... and several Lindt balls. You can buy Lindt balls by the pound on 5th Avenue. Mmmmmm.

Another interesting thing to see was the gigantic hole left by the removal of the World Trade Centre towers. It was a surprise that so little has been done to rebuild nearly 8 years later. The limited works that are going on severely disrupt traffic, and gaggles of people walk past this everyday, serving something of a constant reminder of what happened.

Families of the victims have set up a memorial just across the road from the site, mainly consisting of personal effects found in the rubble, "missing person" pictures placed on walls in the days after the disaster, and letters from around the world expressing regret. What is profoundly obvious in seeing that exhibit and a couple of things around it is how fiercely religion is associated with the event. Churches were the focal points of cleanup operations, and the museum notes with surprise that "even Muslims" turned up to the museum's opening.

Next stop was the Statue of Liberty.

It was built in several pieces and shipped over. It could not be erected until Gustav Eiffel invented steel frame construction, and that took about 20 years. The effect doesn't come out in photos but even from a distance you can clearly see the outlines of the copper panels.

One interesting thing we learned was that the statue was originally brown, and did not turn green until 30 years after it was erected.

This is also pretty noteworthy.

It was a statue depicting the globe which stood between the two WTC towers. It was severly damaged when the towers collapsed on it (note the impact holes - some of the window casings from the aircraft survived and hurtled to earth largly in tact as projectiles) and is now one of many "freedom" memorials in town.

Now for some stuff that is "whack, dawg", to bust out some local-speak.

Green Wood cemetary is the place for fashionable New Yorkers to be buried, and they will not be outdone on style. Note the mini-pyramid tomb.

The top of this hill is a major war monument, and the site of the first battle ever fought by a United States military force. The result was one defeat and one fighting withdrawl against vastly superior English forces. History then records things changing somewhat.

The USA is, of course, the land of decentralised government. The cemetary even has its own police force.

The traffic beat is pretty dead, we hear.

In trendy Greenwich Village (home to numerous sex shops specialising in wares for gay men), we stumbled upon this little critter. We laughed our heads off when we saw the flashing lights.

Then it stood up and we realised it only had three legs. Then we laughed some more.

Greenwich Village is also home to some fairly ambitious foreign policy initiatives, including this proposal to bicycle for peace.

And we will end with another moan about our room. As spoiled honkies, we are proud and somewhat surprised that we lasted 8 nights there.

Bugs in New York City are smart. Possibly far smarter than Matt. After nearly having his leg severed by some sort of biting things (ok, maybe it wasn't that bad but it still hurt) on the first two nights, the tropical-death bug cream applied to the bottom of the bed worked a treat. Sadly, on the last night, the locals developed a cunning plan to attack Matt from the head of the bed, so now his arm is swollen. Bitch, moan, complain. Again, not a lick of sympathy is expected.

We are in Washington DC at the moment, venturing terribly close to the end of this holiday. No Obama sightings yet, but we are working on it.