We woke up bright and early, having avoided a late night, but we hadn't slept particularly well. We were grateful for the air conditioning, but the room was still humid and we could tell it was going to be a hot day. We still weren't prepared, after our shower and make-shift breakfast, for just how hot it was going to be. The plan was to make use of our Big Bus pass to do an overview tour of the downtown, so we mapped out the subway route to Times Square.
It was straightforward enough and we were only a block or so from the subway station, but when we exited the hostel into the street, we immediately hit a wave of humidity and heat, which intensified dramatically when we descended the steps into the subway station. It had not been worth it to shower. The only way to describe the soup we had wandered into, as we waited for the air conditioned subway cars, was to compare it to a sauna. We were soaked in sweats in minutes. And therefore, we started out our day feeling, already, relatively miserable.
The ticket pick up was at Madame Tussaud's wax museum, and we were early enough to avoid a really long line. We were annoyed to learn that our New York City tourist passes did not include the night time Brooklyn bus tour to see the Manhattan Skyline, so we accepted the up-charge, which would extend our use of the bus pass to the third day of our weekend. In hindsight, we should have just purchased a week-long subway pass - but we were deterred by our absolute disgust when considering any length of time down there, and the chaotic mapping of subway lines that seems highly illogical. We were cheered up momentarily by this woman:
Anyone who says that Ghostbusters wasn't a truly amazing reboot is lying to themselves. And Leslie Jones is wonderful, but I could not pull off her facial expression.
Our tour guide for the Downtown bus loop told us that he is a born and bred New Yorker, and a history major, so he could tailor the tour to whatever our particular interests are. If there is one type of performer/public speaker/teacher/person you listen to in public that I dislike, it is the self-indulgent type. And this guy was vying for an award in that category. He made sure to tell us at every opportunity that he's a service worker like any server, so he depends on tips. He made comments about his tour group (us) falling in love with him. Maybe some people were taken with him, but I was not one of them. Andrea didn't want to go to the top, which kind of defeated the purpose of taking the bus. It was impossible to see half of the things that were being pointed out to us, but I completely understood that it was truly too hot to venture upstairs. The interior of the bus was air conditioned.
When I finally convinced her to brave the heat, she reluctantly agreed and we saw some of the most southern sections of the island from the reprieve of our umbrella (which we'd brought anticipating rain).
I did learn some interesting things about Manhattan from my self-satisfied tour guide. Henry Hudson mapped it while sailing for the Dutch East India company. The Hudson River is named for it. The island was settled from south to north, starting in the early 1600s, and it was first settled by the Dutch who named it New Amsterdam. There are claims that they bought it from the Canarsee tribe of the Lenape Native Americans for the equivalent of US$24 (worth about $1050 in 2014). In any case, they made a treaty with the wrong nation of Native Americans, as the island was actually mostly controlled by the Weckquaesgeeks. Apparently Manna-hata means "island of many hills" in the Lenape language.
It wasn't long before the British took over in 1664 and renamed it New York after the Duke of York, and although the Dutch reclaimed it shortly after, they made a deal to permanently cede New York to the British in 1673 in exchange for an island in Indonesia.
Wall Street is named for the physical wall that colonists erected to protect them from the Native Americans, but the physical wall did nothing to keep them safe, and it was taken down. This is current site of the financial district, including the stock exchange, where an artist installed an enormous bronze bull because he wanted the stock exchange to be a bull market, instead of some other kind of market. Truthfully, this made absolutely no sense to me. What I retained was that people from all over the world like touching the bull's testicles for good luck. Logical.
I was also interested to learn that the streets below Water Street used to all be water. The island expands using garbage. I wonder if it will protect them from rising sea levels. Down here, we were asked to switch buses to combine with another tour group, and our new tour guide was charming without spending half her breath asking for more money. (Andrea wondered if they get paid a server's wage, or if they just ask for tips because they are part of the service industry. I think this is a valid question.)
We decided to stay down in the air conditioning for the trek back up to Times Square, and smugly ate our packed lunches of sandwiches (cheese and hummus for me, ham and cheese for Andrea), trail mix, apples, and Capri Sun juice boxes.
For the afternoon, we planned to go to the Rockefeller Centre and it was a really good idea.
Who am I kidding with these posts? NYC is all about the photos :)
We were in search of an indoors activity to keep us out of the heat, so we opted to spend the rest of the afternoon at MoMa. For me, this was becoming the summer of modern art - the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the Apollinaire exhibit at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, and now MoMa. Modern art appears to be my happy place. But we made the mistake of being there on a Friday night around 3:30pm. The museum is open free to the public from 4-8pm on Fridays courtesy of UNIQLO. I don't like UNIQLO very much. We had a few minutes of peace before it was literally filled wall-to-wall with people.
And even though the crowds were awful, there was an exhibit on Dadaism, one of my favourite artistic movements because it's so weird. I studied Francis Picabia, one of the founders, in my French lieterature course about text and image in the age of modern art, where I was first introduced to Apollinaire. The exhibit featured "self-portraits" by artists that were engaging with the Dada movement. They were encouraged by Tristan Zara to write on photographs of themselves or to feature their portrait as part of a collage.
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| "I'm against everything and everyone." |
MoMa is also home to "Starry Night" by Van Gogh, and while it is definitely as mesmerizing in person as you would expect of a painting with this much cred (just like the Mona Lisa), it was also swarming.
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| It's more of a nature morte than a landscape, though. |
Instead of wandering around in search of a restaurant, we ate at the MoMa restaurant and were not disappointed. We even crossed "cheesecake" off our NYC to-do list.
We made our way up to south-east corner of Central Park because my mum indicated that the store from Big (1988) with the life-size piano was on one of the southern corners of the Park.
On the way we saw these iconic buildings:
We learned that the store we were seeking out had been closed since my mum's trip to NYC, and Andrea consoled herself with a trip to Sephora.
It was approaching 7pm and we were hot and tired, but the thought of descending into the pits of hell (the subway) was unbearable. There had a bit of rain that had gotten us wet, but also cooled the temperature slightly, and we opted to walk from 59th Street to 106th Street while exploring Central Park.
We were rewarded with a view of sunset on one of the lakes from behind the skyline before we were attacked by bugs, which I swallowed by accident as I ran...
... and a view of the Imagine tribute to John Lennon.
The sun was fully down before we made it back to our hostel, and we had discussions about the etiquette of men who encounter women in public places at night. There have been women abducted in broad daylight in Central Park, but the fear is always more visceral at night. But we made it back safely, did some planning for the next day, and read our books before bed. It felt like we hadn't done much because we were so miserable doing it all in the heat, but we realized while planning that we had actually made a sizeable dent in our wish list for our trip, and were looking forward to see the Statue of Liberty the next day on the water (out of the heat trap of the buildings!).
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