Okay, my impressions and experiences of New York City thus far, in no particular order:
-Manhattan is not shiny. The city largely does not appear to have changed since the 1930s, with the exception of the vehicles and the advertising. The subway? Add electronic turnstiles to your mental image of an underground train from the days of the depression – that’s the New York subway It’s actually quaint and charming in a grimy sort of way, but coming from Vancouver where almost everything was built after 1930, it comes as a bit of a surprise.
-It’s not garbage day. It’s EVERY day that the sidewalks are lined with unending piles of garbage bags. This is apparently normal. Welcome to theBig Apple. The core is in one of those bags.
-Our downtown, three star hotel is tired, old, covered in construction dust, and has an elevator that takes ten minutes to arrive after you’ve called it, and sinks down the the basement helplessly if more than a few people are in it, requiring some to get out at the basement level so the rest can get back up to the first floor. We share our bathroom with the rest of the floor, and even with shower shoes, you don’t come out of the shower feeling clean. We were expecting this. We simply can’t afford oppulence in Manhattan. We just wanted to BE here, and have air conditioning. What came as a bonus, however, was the big empty room across from ours, which is dark and filled with sledgehammers and looking like a newly reopened crypt. What was even better was when we went to bed at 11, with it looming like a black hole across from our door, and then when we woke at 4 am for a bathroom run, somene had covered the entrance way with cellophane. Seriously – the city that never sleeps.
-We went to a taping of the Colbert Report, which features Michael J Fox, albeit on a screen from a camera backstage, and that was amazing.
-We saw Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island today and the weather was fabulous.
-We went to Greenwich Village to see the building which is the exterior shot from Friends, and that was delightful to me.
-The Village is charming and I loved it, and we found a bookstore called Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, which we immediately photographed and entered, leaving with several books and lighter wallets. We may go back, because we saw more things we wanted but couldn’t justify to ourselves.
-Pregnancy makes my feet want to die. It’s like someone smashed my metatarsals into smithereens with a sledgehammer and said “SO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FRIENDS BUILDING, DOOOO YOOOOU?” Yes, I’ve tried new insoles. Yes, we stop to rest my feet whenever I can say “LOOK! A BENCH!”. Yes, it’s all worth it. But my feet still really fucking hurt.
-Perfect Husband is afraid that pregnancy is going to make ME die. This may or may not be based on the fact that I nearly fainted on the subway on our way to our hotel Monday afternoon. So if I’m not totttering around town with a grin on my face, he worries that I’m either not enjoying myself, or about to pass out, or both. However, I am, and I’m not. Feet or no feet, creepy hotel or no.
Tomorro: Avenue Q,and I see the King Tut is in town. King Tut terrifies me. He is the stuff of my nightmares. I’m pretrt sure my necrophobia developed when my progressive private Montessori school decided to teach the eight year olds about Egyptian mummies.
So I think I have to go see King Tut.