New York. The city with a thousand names, like...the Big Apple. Er, some others probably. Scarlett referred to it after our first night, disturbed by the unremitting noise of the Manhattan traffic, as 'the city that you think might go to sleep at some point, but then actually it doesn't', which sums it up remarkably pithily I feel. The cab drivers are most culpable of noise pollution. As well as hurling obscenities at one another (and passing pedestrians), they seem to be tootling their horns more often than they're not, often at the most innocuous or unalterable of circumstances. It serves to reinforce my idea of having three horns in every car - one that's for emergencies, one that says 'come on!', and one that says 'hiya!'. I should probably do the voiceover.
We've crammed so much stuff into the last couple of days that it really feels like we've been here for ages. Although the grid street system doesn't actually work in practice due to the curvature of the earth - every so often surprised town planners have to cut the corners off grid squares to correct the problem - it is nonetheless a genius invention. After all, it is how God intended it, as Americans enjoy telling you. Consequently, we've managed to avoid getting lost, even though this city is absolutely enormous, so we've more or less ticked all the tourist boxes.
We went up the Empire State Building and absorbed the view of unfettered urbanisation all around - we perhaps couldn't see quite as much concrete as we could from the top of the Tokyo Tower, due to the rather unmistakable presence of the East and Hudson rivers and the unpleasant layer of smog that obscures the horizon here, but it is nonetheless an astonishingly large city. It is also sensationally busy all of the time - although the fact we've sensibly managed to time our visit with the Easter weekend may have something to do with that.
Other things we've done include: hitching a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, which takes in a view of the Manhattan skyline and sails past Lady Liberty (fair play to her, she does look pretty noble) and hordes of quivering 1920s immigrants on Ellis Island; walking over the Brooklyn Bridge; strolling through Central Park; riding the subway to Grand Central Station; and drinking cwoffee, lots of cwoffee. We also saw an unbelievable show on Broadway, but I'll generously allow Scarlett to
fill you in on that when she next posts.
New Yorkers seem to be incredibly passionate people; they specialise in intensity of emotion, whether it's happy, sad or angry. Catch a glimpse of any two locals in conversation and they tend to be extremely animated, usually over really quite trivial things - altogether more animated than I would be when talking about, say, the quality, or otherwise, of my cwoffee.
It rained pretty hard today, so we decided to head indoors to a museum, and after an abortive trip to the Natural History Museum (extraordinarily long queue just to buy tickets) we headed to the National Museum of the American Indian, which was really evocative and interesting, but also quite sad. I have to say that if I was an Indian living in America today, I would find it very difficult not to constantly feel embittered. It is tempting to think of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas as homogenous in culture, but in fact they were a diverse set of societies (think of the geographical area over which they were spread), and all of these cultures were eradicated, or at least corroded to the brink of extinction, by the comparatively recent arrival of a people from remote lands with a superiority complex. Looking at the beautiful intricacies on display in native art, tools and dress, it is impossible not to be moved to some degree. I'll probably be banging on about Indians lots more on the blog as we move around the States, since I did study them at university and that - so you'll be looking forward to that, I'm sure!
We're embarking on the third leg of our North American tour (we're a bit like a rock band, aren't we?) tomorrow when we head off to Washington DC. The capital. The capitol. This should be fun. Think of the satire!
- Adam
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