Ill try and keep this as short as possible. Heres what Ive been up to so far. Tuesday: Arrived at hostel. Hostel was a shit hole. Stayed one night and checked out the following morning. Wednesday: Booked another cheap hotel on the edge of Chinatown. Got to grips with the subway system and took a train to the Port Authority bus terminal in order to look for our Megabus bus stop. This is where we bumped into John, a convicted criminal turned unofficial tour guide. He offered to show is to the bus stop; we were naive enough to think that maybe John might do us a favour but in his words New York is all about money. On the way he told us that he had just finished a 22 year stint in jail for shooting a man who tried to steal his money. Turns out my aim was better than his he said. For a murderer, he was quite pleasant. Checked into the new hotel in Chinatown, a place that is about as Chinese as it gets outside of China and visited the 9/11 memorial fountains. They were beautiful but I hated the people taking selfies and group shots over the names of the deceased. Disrespectful. We visited Wall Street and watched a sunset over the Statue of Liberty. On the way back we met Bill and inadvertently laughed along with his casual racism about Mexican immigrants for fear of appearing impolite if we didnt. To his credit, he was able to make the distinction between Great Britain and its four constituent countries. Thursday: watched the 9/11 memorial service on TV before visiting the Statue of Liberty and the Ellis Island immigration museum. I loved the Statue although our trip to the immigration museum ended up being unintentionally hilarious due to the fact that the museum held no exhibits. They had been removed to save them from damage following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. A handy picture showing two employees removing an old wheelchair helped us understand what they meant by removed. This effectively meant that 200-300 people were wandering around looking at empty cases and blank walls, the hilarity of which was only apparent to myself and Sarah Thrush. People just thought we were crying as opposed to crying with laughter. Whilst I was making use of the restroom a bloke came and stood in the next urinal whilst still listening to the audio descriptive device they hand out. Im not sure taking a piss was detailed from the perspective of an immigrant but I figured that maybe it was an audio manual teaching him how to handle his own penis. We visited the Empire State Building which was heaving with tourists and Times Square which is an assault on the senses. Colour, noise and people everywhere. Its insane. This city is so overwhelming, everyday is filled with little events you remember and when you walk down the street you overhear so many conversations its like youre dipping into their lives for a brief moment. Its amazing how the tall mixes with the small; how one giant building can be stood next to a tiny little deli. It reminds me a little of Rome in that the new buildings are built around the old and they effectively become monuments of an age passed. The locals are really friendly and the pizza is delicious. We also visited a museum about American Indians which was both boring and shit. Heres two pictures youve seen a millions times before:
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 06:13:36 +0000
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