Day 9 NYC

What a day! We were up at 6:45 and poured ourselves into bed at 2:00 AM, in between was packed full of utter fun and delight!

Our plan, so neither couple would be held to a schedule, was to open a specific shade in our RVs as a sign to the other that we were up and ready to go. Great plan except we learned that with the early morning sun shining across our trailers you can’t see if the shade is open or closed! John eventually wandered over and discovered that we had in fact set the signal (almost two hours before!) and we were on our way into the city by 9:00.

When your campground is a parking lot in the middle of a big city, some patches of astroturf will do for tent sites!!

Once again, unlike the GTA transit system we are used to, the PATH commuter trains and the NYC subway are economical, comprehensive and convenient to navigate. We are now also acutely aware that anything is better that driving around here so the truck stays parked!

Our first order of business was to walk to the South Street Seaport to see if we could score show tickets. What’s a visit to NYC without a Broadway show? A reasonable lineup (or at least it would have been reasonable if not for the scorching sun and heat) and within half an hour we were on our way with tickets for Chicago tucked away in John’s man purse.

As I said, the lineup, while not unreasonable, was stinky hot, so we had to replenish our electrolytes. Julie claims it was 12:00 somewhere so we were fine with cold beer as our morning snack!

 What 21st century travellers do when they hit a wifi hotspot!

Electronic gadgets disappeared pretty quickly when our 'mid-morning snack' arrived!

Our next order of business was to head uptown just a bit and visit the Tenement Museum. John and Julie have visited these several times and have always raved about how interesting the tours were. It was one of the things we didn’t get to in our last visit so was nearer the top of the list this time. We were able to buy tickets for the early afternoon Irish Outsiders Tour that gave us enough time to go around the block to Chinatown and have lunch at Congee Palace. Authentic is great, but it was amusing that our waiter understood so little English that ordering was a challenge! John, always up to any challenge, managed the task and we shared lunch, more or less as we ordered, and walked back to join our tour.

The Tenement Museum has a gift shop attached to their main office that is filled with interesting little treasures. A visit there alone might have been an interesting way to spend the day! Our favourite was a children’s book that David found. It was clearly fashioned to parallel Margaret Wise Brown’s Good Night Moon. Very similar colouring, illustrations, and rhyme, however this one is the 21^st century version titled Good Night i-Pad! Hilarious! The only drawback to travelling everywhere on foot is that you’re hesitant to do things like buy a hardcover book you have to carry for the rest of the day! Thanks to our friend Mary Laforet, who was the first person to remind me that a digital photo is a great way to remember things, a picture of the ISBN will, I hope, come in handy next time we are driving by a Barns and Noble!

The tour was fascinating – the tour guide a little less so! I will give him amusing, in a bizarre sort of way. This of course becomes a bit of a politeness challenge when you are with friends and happen to catch someone’s eye and the expression on their face. I spent much of the time controlling my grin and avoiding eye contact! That all sounds so unkind, and I don’t mean it to be, but honestly someone should tell this guy that presenting an automated message is odd unless there is a headset and a recoding involved! No matter, we certainly got the message that for the Irish immigrants, living in a German neighbourhood at the end of the 1800s, life was a challenge! That the three room tenement flats were desirable because they were a step up from where they had been, is almost inconceivable! I was unaware of the influence of Tammany Hall, the local Democratic Party organization, for these immigrants. Without family support or financial resources to even bury their dead sometimes, the support from Tammany Hall that miraculously showed up when it was most needed, secured votes in the next election. In a very real way these early immigrants helped to form the political landscape of the time.

Following our tour, with enough time before our Broadway show, we thought we would go back to the trailer to shower and rest. Stopping on the way back for a look in Century 21 (a huge department store across from the new Freedom Tower – old site of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers) we realized that we had neither the patience nor the energy for shopping so heading back to the RV was a great idea!

After freshening up and enjoying happy hour we were on our way to Broadway! Chicago was wonderful! The staging was brilliant in its simplicity. In fairness David didn’t appreciate the staging as much as I did, he likes a little more visual content, but since this is my blog we’re going with brilliant! We all enjoyed the show immensely though and being in a New York state of mind decided to stroll Times Square before calling it a night.

Now we had been to Times Square before but apparently never on a Friday night. None of us had ever seen anything like it. The centre of the Square is being renovated so pedestrian traffic is limited to the sidewalks on either side of the street. I have never even imagined a pedestrian traffic jam but I’m not sure how else to describe it – throngs of people moving in all directions with such congestion that sometimes there was no movement at all. At one point we were literally jammed in hundreds of other people with no one able to move anywhere for an extended period of time. The native New Yorkers in the crowd quickly were identified as tempers flared and shouting began in a vain attempt to get things moving. I can’t say that I felt threatened or even nervous but it certainly wasn’t for the faint of heart or the claustrophobic! Although the trip through Times Square certainly took much longer than anticipated, we were far too amused and quite frankly gobsmacked to be bothered!

Along the way, when the crowd wasn’t as dense, we could see the bizarre and unusual that is part of the Times Square culture. There were the store displays and giant billboards, human statues and countless superheroes, prophets and performers. The latest addition that none of us had ever seen before were the painted women. They were ‘dressed’ as glittery showgirls, American flags, Statues of Liberty, etc., but they were all naked! Well I guess not technically since they all had a g-string fashioned from what appeared to be cling wrap and they were painted! That’s it! Painted glitter and feathers in their hair for the showgirls, those painted red, white and blue in a patriotic tribute like I’ve never seen ... well you get the picture!

At one point we stopped to ask two friendly NYPD officers for directions. I couldn’t help but ask how they ever managed to do their jobs on a night like this. They laughingly claimed it wasn’t that difficult and they relied mostly on instinct! Those are some pretty fine instincts to keep a crowd like that from going wild! Before we left they did ask me if everyone in Canada was as happy and friendly as I was. I assured them we were and with their redirection we headed off to the Stardust Diner.

We visited there on our last trip to NYC and we wanted to bring John and Julie back to see it. It is manned by out of work (at least for the moment) actors, singers and dancers. One minute your waiter is taking your order, the next they are asking to be excused as they grab a mic, hop up on a table or the back of a bench and break into a Broadway number. It is a great evening’s entertainment and the talent is considerable. It was a lot louder and more boisterous than when we had visited before but apparently that was the mood of the night in Times Square, and at least everybody in here kept their clothes on!

Travelling home on the NYC subway at 1:00 in the morning is also a real treat! Admittedly you can find crazies at any time of day but the wee hours bring out the special folks! New Yorkers are very friendly and those who were also clearly amused by the mad antics shared a comment and a chuckle as we journeyed across the city and in to Jersey. This truly is the city that doesn’t sleep, but by this hour in the morning they will just have to party on without us. After all, who knows what adventure tomorrow might hold that will require me well rested?