They’re two they’re four they’re six and eight, shunting trucks and hauling freight

I’m starting tonight’s blog with a puzzle.

Are birds afraid of heights? I am going to argue that they are afraid of heights, and I’ll provide evidence to support that argument later in the post.

One of us needs a shave. I mean, seriously needs a shave. I won’t say who that is to protect their privacy, but I’m sure as you look at the photos that I post tonight, you’ll be able to figure it out for yourself. More on that later, too.

For those of you who have been following the blog since the beginning, you would have noticed that each post starts with the first line/s of a song.

If you started following part-way through our trip, it might pay to go back to the very beginning and start from there, and hopefully it will all make more sense.

Or maybe not.

The intention is that the  song bears some relevance, albeit sometimes a very obscure relevance, to the topic of the post.

I tried to find a song for tonight’s post that says something like “I’m eating myself into an early grave”, or “I’ve eaten too much bagel and cream cheese and now I think I’m going to throw up”. Unfortunately, no songs that express those sentiments appear to have ever been written .. well not that I can find anyway. It’s surprising really, because I’ve watched locals here stuffing their faces with bagel and cream cheese and I honestly thought that it would have come up before this.

If you know of such a song, please leave a comment and let me know. I will be grateful. I might even dedicate another post to you.

But I digress.

For those of you with children, you might recognise the song from tonight’s post as the theme song from Thomas the Tank Engine. Tonight’s post is about the subway here in NY.

Before I get to the subway though, I just wanted to talk about something else briefly. Don’t panic – I’ll get there eventually.

There are street signs here on Seasame Street that prohibit parking on one side of the street on Thursdays from 9.00am to 10.30am – I assume for garbage collection. I wondered briefly the other day what happened to the cars that were normally parked there when that blackout period occurred.

Well today is Thursday (here), and I can now report to you that I know the answer, which is …

… they double-park on the other side of the street.

How that works is anybody’s guess. Not only are they parked in so that they have no room to manoeuvre back to front, but now they can’t even get out because there is a car parked beside them too.

The mysteries of life on Seasame Street 🙂

But back to the topic of tonight’s post – the NY subway.

There are a few quirky things about the subway. Firstly, as you would expect, it is underground. Actually a lot of things here in NYC are underground, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

Because they are underground, you have no sense of direction, except that if you are on an uptown train, you are basically heading north. Likewise, a downtown train basically heads south.

As well as that, they are very noisy. They run through tunnels and don’t face the same issues that above-ground Queensland Rail trains face – specifically level crossings and cars. As a result of that, they seem to go very fast – flat out it seems – and they go clattering across the track and points making a great deal of noise.

At some stations, they have 4 tracks – 1 for each platform (uptown and downtown) and then 2 central tracks for trains that skip the station. Those trains go zooming through the station making a great deal of noise.

Another thing that is unusual is that as the train comes through the tunnel and into the station, it pushes a lot of air in front of it, so you get this rush of wind as an early warning of an incoming train.

We were on the train the other day and there was this lady with a small bag at her feet. Suddenly a small dog pushed it’s head up through the bag and looked around.

We asked someone about this and we were told that the NY subway system only allows dogs on the train if they can fit in a bag … so people go creative …

Now that’s a Google image, and not my picture, but it seems to show that it is true. People really DO get creative.

Another thing about the subway is that it is not uncommon to have someone get into the carriage and start a spiel…”My name is John and I served in Afghanistan. I’m now homeless and I need your help …”

Sometimes they sing. But they always walk up and down the carriage with a paper cup taking donations before moving to the next carriage. We have seen it happen a few times now.

The conductors on the train are in serious need of elocution lessons. Many of them are African American and have a bit of a southern drawn, mixed with a NY way of saying everything quite fast. There have been many trains that we have been on where the conductor makes an announcement at every station – sometimes 3 of 4 sentences long – and I haven’t got a clue what he said for the entire journey.

One more thing that I can say about the subway is that while the subway is a lot of things, it IS air conditioned. So if you are heading up/downtown, a short ride on the subway gives you some cool relief.

My final observation about the subway is that if you hesitate getting onto a seat, you miss out. Basically the trick is to fix a stare on a seat as you get on, and go for it. Even if a space on the seat is nowhere wide enough for a normal person, as soon as you start backing in, everyone squishes up and space appears. It’s quite funny to watch.

So what did we do today?

We started the day by walking the High Line. It is an old abandoned railway line that is set up above the road, and rather than being demolished it was made into a beautiful walkway, approximately 2.3 Km long.

In one place (see photo above) there is a section where water flows across a section of the path, and you can take your shoes off and allow it to wash over your feet. I can think of worse things to do on a steaming hot day 🙂

From there we went to The Brooklyn Bagel and Coffee shop and had a really early lunch. The bagels were amazing and offset the disaster that was yesterday’s faulty salad lunch.

It was here that I earned my stripes as a NYer, because I got my very own “Big Gulp” cup to walk around with.

If you look at that photo closely, you will also get a hint about who is overdue for a shave.

I know that you are probably getting bored with NYC weather reports, but today was indeed another hot one. We were in Hell’s Kitchen, so that could explain it?

After lunch, we went to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. That was an interesting experience looking at the Intrepid aircraft carrier, a submarine, and the Enterprise Space Shuttle. I looked for Captain Kirk and Mr Spock, but I suspect that they may have been on a different Enterprise.

After the Intrepid, we extended our ninja powers and caught a bus back across town to Radio City Music Hall, did the Stage Door Tour, and I got to meet one of the Rockettes.

The Radio City venue is an amazing venue that can hold almost 6,000 people and runs 6 shows per day for 8 weeks every Christmas. It is an astonishing venue. Very old world.

Some of you who are following the blog might know that I have a bit of an obsession with black Chevy Suburbans. Well, I need to report that black Chevy Suburbans are so yesterday … I’ve now fallen in love with a black Ford Escalade, and I want one.

It’s about as long as a city block, and would be perfect for towing the van. It would have to sit out on the driveway though, because I’ll only be able to get half of it in the garage.

Then it was off to M&M Times Square to have a look around. Chocolate in all shapes, forms, colours, sizes, and flavours. It’s like a dream come true.

In the interests of equality, we also visited Hershey’s Times Square, and bought some souvineers (that may not make it home).

The other day I made mention of a couple of Wonder Women in Times Square that appeared to only be wearing paint. Well, funny thing, but they were there again today and I can confirm that, above the waist, they are indeed only wearing paint.

The weatherman finally got it right today. At about 6.00pm the heavens opened and it came bucketting down. Everybody scrambled for cover. Probably the most enthusiastic scramblers were Wonder Women #1 and #2, who were obviously wearing water based paint … which started to wash off in the torrential downpour.

They must have some standards in Times Square. Paint applied sparinging to a couple of key places on your upper body is considered tasteful, but when it washes off …

The Wonder Women got dressed very quickly 🙂

From there it was home to dinner.

Given that I have now confessed that it is me that needs a shave, I just wanted to share briefly with you my philosophy on shaving. It’s very simple really – don’t shave when you need to, shave when you don’t need to.

That might seem a bit odd, but experience has taught me that when I shave before going out somewhere important, invariably I will nick myself and lose a litre of blood. And it spoils that special something that we we about to go to.

So my theory is to shave when I don’t need to. If I slice myself open, there is no big deal about how much blood is lost, what shirt it gets onto, how long it takes to get better, or how long I am cranky.

The other night before going out to Broadway to see Beautiful, I got the first hint that I might want to consider shaving. Because I needed to shave, I didn’t.

Pretty clever, hey?

The next night I didn’t need to shave, so I decided to go for it. After all, the last time I shaved was in Brisbane before we left to come to NY … and that’s probably where I left my razor 🙁

It wasn’t in my toiletry bag where it should have been.

No razor means no shaving. The little shop around the corner where we buy our 1 gallon tanks of spoiled milk doesn’t sell razors, so it might be San Francisco before I can find a supermarket and right the wrong.

Probably also explains why TOTIL no longer kisses me goodnight.

Sigh 🙁 The best laid plans.

Back to my original puzzle about birds being afraid of heights. When we were up at the top of the Empire State Building, I took this picture. What do you see?

If you look closely, you can see bird droppings on the metal framework.

I’m pretty sure that if I was sitting out there, on the outside of the Empire State Building, 365m above the ground, I’d be cr*pping myself too.

So that proves it. Birds are afraid of heights.

If you disagree or have an alternative theory, leave a comment because I’d love to hear it.

Ciao

#G&KTAKEUSA