NYC #3 Manhattan

It stormed overnight and rained during the day as is proven here in this skyscraper photo we took to start off the blog.
We’ve been using the New York Subway to get around and despite its reputation we feel it’s safer because you avoid any heavy objects or light aircraft that may fall from the tall buildings.

It seems New York is still very nervous about falling buildings, security is everywhere and severe. For instance getting onto the Statue of Liberty ferry you go through airport type security to get onboard. Then when you are on Liberty Island you go through the same thing again, then when you enter the statute pedestal you can’t take the bags that have already been x-rayed twice, you have to put them in a locker.

Police are everywhere in the streets and in huge numbers.
Other official security people are everywhere too, all heavily armed. I don’t think New Yorkers or Americans will get over the Twin Towers for a long time and it was eerie first arriving here because... anyone who saw live coverage of the planes flying into the World Trade Centre as we did will remember you could also hear he sound of the jets as it happened.
So we were looking out over Manhattan and it seems the flight path into New York City goes right over the Hudson River. In the afternoon this causes the suns angle to casts perfect shadows of the aircraft flashing across the face of the buildings, it uncannily appears they are crashing into them, this illusion is further created by the roar of their engines overhead.

Terrorists, Gorgo or over sized apes haven’t kept the tourists away though, the lines to some galleries have proved that. We stood in a queue that was about a quarter of a kilometre long for the Metropolitan Museum of Art only to last five minutes inside. The only art we experienced was the art of packing as many people into a building as possible. The Guinness Book of Records should have been there or maybe a talent scout for a circus auditioning people for the clown car act, where about twenty crawl out of a mini minor unfortunately our experience wasn’t that funny.

This was all good though, we just walked around the streets and through Central Park which gives a better feel of the city. We rode the subway and met many helpful people along with lunatics, weirdos, extroverts, introverts, religious fanatics and people damning the lord everywhere.

The architecture was good to see especially smaller stuff like the old apartment buildings with the fire escapes on the outside.
We had fire engines and police vehicles flashing past constantly with their sirens wailing, we heard cab drivers blasting horns and hurling abuse, we avoided everything from trucks and buses to skateboarders going through red lights when we were on the crossings, we saw sad homeless people pushing shopping carts full of their rubbish past multi million dollar apartments overlooking Central Park on Fifth Avenue.

So we got exactly what we expected of a day out in this city and it was a surprisingly good experience except for the homeless, the beggars and the people trying to eke some sort of living out of a dog eat dog city.Read more