Fri., Jan. 9, 2009, Flying Somewhere Just South of Greenland
New York looks like it does in the movies, and I know you’ve seen the movies. You’ve probably also been there yourself, so I will not bother describing it.
But a few things were interesting to me:
* It takes damned long to get around. I always pictured New York as this super-dense pile of sky-scrapers with nothing too far apart, like some kind of anti-LA. In fact, even most of Manhattan is still a sprawled out American metropolis and riding the subway for 2 hours to meet a friend is not unheard of.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6241.jpg”,”Subway.”)::
* The subway is old. In China nothing is old unless it’s really old. I spent several happy weeks riding Beijing’s various spotless and modern new subway lines mere weeks after they’d opened. The New York subway, on the other hand, is cramped, creaking, and has almost no escalators. The tracks are usually full of some sort of strange liquid apparently attractive to rats. There are narrow steel support beams everywhere and station names written by hand in little blue on white tiles.
* Time Square was very underwhelming. Just kind of looks like your average major intersection in Seoul, just it’s been in more bad movies.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6238.jpg”,”Meh.”)::
* You have to get scanned, x-rayed, and looked at suspiciously to board the Liberty and Ellis Islands Ferry. Clearly, the terrorists have won. There is a very detailed and thoughtful museum at Ellis Island with far less unnecessary patriotic sop than might be expected – though how our past reflects on our current immigration policy is left for the visitor to conclude.
* New Yorkers are very friendly.
* Many Californians seem to find life in New York difficult and unhappy.
* I been a few places, and New York is without a doubt the most diverse place on the globe. Maybe someday I’ll try my hand at being unhappy there for a while, if for nothing else than to try a different ethnicity’s cuisine everyday for a year.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/images/IMG_6282.jpg”,”Yay America.”)::