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.

Noo Yawk

It seems everywhere we go we need new superlatives to explain the things we have seen. It is quite possible that the Americans have the most incredible city on earth. An honourable mention to Istanbul, but this place is pretty special.

We could bang on about the buildings, the stories of personal endeavour, the shopping, the sites - and we will at nauseating length when we get back - but perhaps the most incredible thing is how people interact with each other. Even the Indian residents are nice to each other. People here speak their mind. If they see something they like in a shop, they will walk up to the shopkeeper, exclaim how beautiful it is, and then keep going. Strangers chat to each other everywhere. They are polite, friendly and interested. Do that in a magical setting and you are on a winner.

Here are the highlights of the first couple of days.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not quite the Louvre, but not far off, either. They have a magnificent pharaonic Egypt collection, and we now know where all the good bits that were missing from the temples have gone - the Upper East Side.

This will upset some people, but the Met's Egyptian rooms are quite frankly significantly more impressive than any museum exhibit in Egypt. It leaves the Egyptian Museum (the national museum in Cairo) for dead, both on curation and quality of exhibits. Go to the Met.

It also has excellent Americana exhibits. New York seems to have been built largely thanks to a view visionary politicians and a gaggle of super rich industrialists who funded the great artistic projects. Many of those families also donated rooms of their palatial homes' furniture and there is a wing of recreated rooms, mostly from the Upper East Side again.

And they have Henry VIII's ceremonial armour, and various other cool military bits and pieces.

And if that doesn't have your attention, Central Park is full of these awesome little squirrels!

We spent a lot of time in Central Park, sometimes just wandering around aimlessly admiring everything. Apartments overlooking it are only $3 - $4 million. Or $10m in a famous building. Bargain.

Matt likes this photo. The second turtle tried its luck and got pushed back into the water, but in turtle-slow-mo. Magical stuff.

John Lennon was shot just a few metres from here, if anyone is interested.

And, as you do, the locals have put in an Alice in Wonderland statue. Apart from donating to museums, when a grande dame of society dies, her diligent sons tend to have interesting bronze statues erected in her honour, so there are lots of things like this scattered around town.

It will come as no surprise that we have given the local food a good going over. This is a hot dog bought from a trailer outside the Met. The sauce came out of a big tub from a ladle, and was the colour of the taxis. It even tasted like taxi. Incredible place.

And it's nice to find a place that really understands pizza. This is just up the road from Katz's deli, made famous by the When Harry met Sally orgasm scene. We just couldn't afford $20 for a pastrami on rye, at least not for lunch, so we got pizza from a Mexican.

We have also had ravioli cooked by Mexicans, and Asian cooked by Mexicans. The Romanian food we had was thanks to Romanians, and the only food served by cauco New Yorkers was some tragic Mexican we had last night.

There is a great toyshop called FAO Schwarz, which is where Tom Hanks played the giant piano in "Big". They have 7ft lego displays, three storey dolls houses, and a shelf of different Monopoly games, including, wait for it, the John Deere Tractors edition.

You can also use a computer terminal to dress barbies on a catwalk, and a staff member then runs commentary for your very own Barbie fashion show.

We of course went up the Empire State. That is the financial district off in the distance.

And we went on a tour of the UN. Here is the UN General Assembly room, the best place in the city of anti-semitic rants.

The building is full of art, and it is really special. When a country offers to donate something to the UN, it can hardly refuse, can it? Imagine a 192 country vote on bad taste? That lack of elbow makes this sort of thing possible - it's a tapestry donated by Belarus. Yes, a tapestry. It depicts nuclear fallout.

And Thailand gave this. It is a gold dome, the sort that you find all over Bangkok, but it contains a bit of Buddha. That makes a lot of sense. It is much less likely to get raided by disgruntled students in the UN foyer than it is in any Bangkok public building. Could Buddha ever having imagined bits of him ending up there? How would the clairvoyant even begin to explain that?

These are cool. When government breaks down in some dust-ridden hell hole in Africa, one of the things the UN does is send in "School in a Box" and "Sport in a Box", so schooling can continue / heating.

We also went to the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The less said about the Guggenheim the better, frankly. MOMA made us a little bit agro. Here are some of the pieces.

These are bits of coloured paper in frames.

This is a Picasso, a rare highlight.

This is a pile of bricks - yes, an exhibit, or an "installation" to use the parlance.

This is a painted bit of wood.

By touching the floor, it is meant to remind the viewer of their connection with the physical world, trees, dirt, etc, and by touching the wall one is drawn to think of the spiritual world. What we in fact thought was that while this unacceptable rubbish is being paid for and displayed in prime real estate, children are starving on the street. We both rushed outside for organic soup in non-biodegradable containers to make ourselves feel better about the yuppy waste.

Oh, how could we forget, here is some cutting edge lint.

The Museum of Natural History is seriously good fun. There are dinosaurs ...

Giant deer (not to be confused the the Monopoly set, above) ...

And models of giant whales. What more could you want?

So, our hotel / hostel / sleeping quarters.

Positives first, it is in an interesting and bohemian location.

It is near Katz's deli, and we met Mr Katz, and Ann Hathaway walked past us just outside yesterday.

Now descending into complaints, because we are living a tough life at the moment. It's certainly the smallest room we have ever had, particularly for $100 per night. About 3m x 2m, with high beds so our bags fit underneath. The windows are sealed shut, and the floor was once a large warehouse and parquetry partitions divide the beds. The mad rooters next door have now progressed to mad farting, and you hear every fart or squeek within about 50m. And there is some sort of biting animal in the beds. It likes Matt's blood, not Penny's, so despite having spent time in the jungles of Laos and Cambodia, and darkest India, the only place on this trip that the tropical-death-strength bug repellant has been used has been Mahattan. This is all just in aid of Matt complaining about the big welts on his feet and ankles. Sympathy is certainly not expected. We are usually out of the room by about 6:45am, and not back until 9pm, so it is not really a problem anyway. We are just worried that the bugs will be in our bags so no one tell Customs.

More to follow. (No one we have come across is coughing, incidentally, and there are no pigs anywhere.)