She’s in to superstition, black cats and voodoo dolls

Hi peeps, and welcome to the end of our third full day in NYC.

Don’t expect anything too philosophical this time … I’m too tired – but it’s a GOOD tired 🙂

Actually today was a comparatively lazy day as I have only hit about 16,000 steps today – well short of the almost 20,000 of the last couple of days. What have we been doing?

To quote Ricky Martin, we’ve been “Livin’ the Vida Loca“. NYC is one crazy place with a number of what seems to be national pastimes … but I’l talk more about that later.

Today started with a real sleep-in – 7.30 for me and I think TOTIL slept a bit after that. It was really hot last night – maybe 25 degrees minimum so we were feeling a little broiled (poached?) by this morning. There is an air conditioner in the room but it is almost noisier than a NY Subway train hurtling into the station, so our options were to sweat it out or use earplugs.

We had an open calendar today, so headed into town just after 9.30am. Keep in mind that it is the Labor Day holiday here today, so it was a bit insane. People everywhere, NYPD everywhere, and the temperature climbed to a sticky 32 degrees or so, and everyone just went a bit crazy.

We figured that nobody else would have considered getting onto the Staten Island ferry today to go sailing past the Statue of Liberty, so that was our first place to visit … along with most of the population of NYC it seems …

But it was all good. While there were hoardes of people there, the ferries are huge and we all got on with room to spare.

From there we had our very first (and hopefully very last) pretzel from a street vendor, and then we went deeper into the Financial district to see the Charging Bull statue.

Now, you may be wondering who those people are in the photo. By the time we got here it must have been about 32 degrees and there was a very long queue for photos. We were both too hot to be that concerned, so I had two options: get a photo from the tail end of the bull with it’s rather significant boy parts on display, or take a picture of the front end of the bull with whoever was standing near it at the time.

From there we walked over to the 9/11 memorial site. The place was swarming with police as you’d expect and it was a very sobering feeling to be in the place where such a hideous attack took place. The location is now a couple of large pools on the site of the buildings, with the names of all who died inscribed around the outside.

We then went up to the One World Observatory, which is higher than the Twin Towers ever were – it stands at about 102 floors high.

The views from the top are absolutely stunning!

By this time it was about 2.30 and we were getting hungry, so decided to go up to Midtown Eastside – I sound like a native NYer when I say that 🙂 – to Katz’s Deli for a pastrami sandwich on rye.

What is the significance of Katz’s Deli? It is the scene from “When Harry met Sally” and the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having”. You’ll have to watch it to understand … there may be children reading this.

We then headed up to Times Square , located between W 46th Steet, W 47th Street and Broadway.

If we thought that the day had been crazy until then, they are really living the Vida Loca up in Times Square. All manner of weird and wonderful things, thousands and thousands of people, police with assault weapons, superheros, a couple of Wonder Women who appeared to be wearing little more than a coat of paint in certain places … I wanted to go up and confirm the costumes, but TOTIL wouldn’t allow it 🙁

We made arrangements for tomorrow night at the Theatre, and then home for dinner.

So I mentioned national pastimes earlier. There are a number of things that I’ve seen that appear to me to be the national pastime of New Yorkers.

Firstly, they seem to have a predisposition for walking around with one of those “Big Gulp” cups everywhere they go. Sometimes it’s a juice, or iced coffee .. but many of them do it. On the train, walking down the street …

Next they seem to have a genetic malfunction where they honk their horn at everything that moves, and everything that doesn’t move. And they don’t have those prissy, beepy little  horns that we have – they all seem to have these loud multi-note things that scare the life out of you when you cross against the lights in front of them …

I can’t wait to get to San Francisco when we have a hire car and do it to blend in.

They also have a love affair with Chevy Suburbans. Black ones. And I don’t know if there is a collective noun for black Chevy Suburbans, but they seem to travel together. A suburb of Suburbans? Maybe a neighbourhood of Suburbans?

Maybe a city?

Maybe they all think they are Secret Service agents. Maybe they really are?

My final observation is about the way that they park their cars. Somehow they manage to jam so many cars together on the side of the street that you can barely walk between them.

You may be able to find a parking space, get your car into the parking space and think you’re pretty clever, but I challenge you to get it back out again!

All for now.

Ciao

#G&KTAKEUSA