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New York City -- Day 1

The girls were especially excited to go to NYC, but I think that I ended up loving it more than anyone else, although we all really liked our visit there.

I was completely unprepared for how much I would like the city. I'd been looking forward to seeing the sights there, but what I really liked the most was just being there and soaking in the atmosphere. As a result, my NYC pictures are very few and far between, because far more than other places, I was too busy absorbing everything to think about taking pictures. (My small NYC collection is here.)

We took the train from the Metropark station in New Jersey into NYC, and got off at Penn Station. Penn Station was a little bit crazy, and I had no idea where I was going, so the first thing I did was buy a subway map, which also had some city streets on it. While I was really prepared for some aspects of the trip, other areas I had just decided to wing it, and NYC stuff was definitely in the winging it category.

We got out onto the sidewalk, but I didn't feel like I could just stop and study my map. People were moving, and we moved right along with them. After a few blocks, I found a Starbucks and we ducked inside to get a drink, but mostly so that I could study the map and get a little bit oriented.

It was at Starbucks that I had my first wow, things are different here moment. I ordered my usual double-tall nonfat latte, and the girl behind the counter, who had some sort of strong accent that fascinated me, called it as a skim latte. I'd never thought much about the usage of nonfat vs. skim, but skim is definitely the word to use on the other side of the country.

After we got our drinks and found a little table to sit at, a man who was sitting at a larger table insisted that we move to his table, and he'd take ours, because we needed more room. I declined at first, but he insisted, so we moved.

That sort of thing never happens in Seattle.

It was almost noon, and we were supposed to meet some friends in Chinatown for lunch at one, so the first order of business was to find our way to Chinatown. I'd been quite sick the day and night before, and was still feeling sort of surprised that I was actually feeling well enough to be doing things like standing up and walking around, and I had pretty much no idea where I was supposed to be in Chinatown, but figured that getting to Chinatown would be a step in the right direction.

So I studied the subway map and we found the station and in finding the station I ran into my biggest difficulty in finding my way around NYC -- I had no idea which way north was. Many times I felt like a compass would have been the best piece of equipment to help me figure out where I was going, and how silly would that look? Standing in the middle of the city peering down at a compass.

But we eventually found our way to the subway station that we wanted to find and bought all-day passes (which involved getting seven dollars in dollar coins from the guy manning the station, because I could only buy two passes with my credit card and the machine wasn't taking bills that day, only coins) and we got onto the subway and off at the right stop and then I called Rebecca who made me really happy by sounding impressed that I was actually near Chinatown and told me how to get to the place we were meeting. When we got there, she gave me a map with all the streets, which totally made my day.

We had lunch in Little Italy, outside, and I admired the buildings. On the west coast, there's so few buildings that are even fifty years old, and to see streets of buildings where they're all older than that is just too cool. I would love to have weeks to just wander through and take pictures of buildings.

After lunch we meandered back to the subway station and the girls got their names painted on cool posters and then we found our way to our hotel, which was down in the financial district. Getting there took a bit longer than I'd intended, because the train that we got on had been rerouted so it went across to Brooklyn instead of running through the financial district and making stops there, first.

Once I was off track, it took me a while and a couple of misinformed train rides to get going back the right way again. This stemmed from my second biggest difficutly finding my way around in New York -- not knowing where the Bronx was. I couldn't find it labelled anywhere on my map, and it was making me crazy because all the subway signs were wanting to take me to the Bronx. While I was pretty sure I didn't want to go TO the Bronx, I didn't know if I wanted to go towards the Bronx or not.

As it turns out, I did, but I didn't figure out where the Bronx was until a while later, when I noticed that my map did, actually, tell me where the Bronx was -- but in big light blue letters that stretched across the north side of my map, that sort of blended into the background. After I figured that out, getting around by train became a whole lot easier.

We checked into our hotel and chilled out for a little bit, then we hit the road again (this time much less encumbered by baggage) with the goal of finding dinner and the Empire State Building. We very randomly chose the place we had dinner at, it was some sort of mexican-cajun place, and dinner was pretty good, but not great, but I still wasn't terribly hungry and food was still tasting kind of weird, so who knows how good it really was.

After dinner, we wandered towards the Empire State Building and did some shopping on the way and then we waited in a very long line to first go through security, then to buy tickets, then to go through security again, then to go up the elevator, and then to go up the second elevator, and then to actually get out onto the viewing platform.

The highlight of waiting in line was that Abby was recognized as a princess. They had a guy in the ticket waiting area who was generally chattering about the audio tour that was available for rent, and as we wound our way around through the switchbacked lines, he spotted Abby, and he pointed at her and said, "Look! There's a princess among us." Abby blushed, and we moved on, until we'd switched back to where he could see us again. This time he asked her where she was from, and asked her if she was a princess. We moved on again, and the third time he said she was probably wishing he'd leave her alone.

The audio tour, which we did rent, (really, how could we not?) was really interesting. What got me especially was that it was built in 14 months. This was something that I thought about a lot on this trip -- how people accomplished so much before so many of the things that we take for granted now were invented. The building was scheduled very carefully, so that the necessary steel arrived right as it was needed, and the precision of the planning was one thing that allowed the building to be built so quickly. But there was no cool computer program to help plan the steel arrivals -- or even an old version of Excel!

After the Empire State Building, the girls hailed a cab and we went back to our hotel, where we all crashed.

Posted by Rachel at July 25, 2004 01:43 AM