New York - the big city

Hello everybody!!
On our way to New Mexico to the family of Kat, we stayed for a couple of days in New York. A fascinating place We had booked a hostel in Spanish Harlem, on the northern end of Manhattan. It is a very colorful neighborhood with lots of people from the Carribean, there are always lots of people out on the streets, lots of small bars and restaurants.

Manhattan is huge. Our first day we walked all the way from the hostel to downtown - like 12 miles and we still hadn't walked the entire length of the island! We crossed central park - we were in the middle of a forest but it was strange to look around and have all the skyscrapers ring the park. Like a huge hole in the maze of construction and cement. Very surreal.

Of course we also visited all the "sights" - Times Square with the projected advertisements covering the whole height of the skyscrapers; the second hole in the city which was the World Trade Center Memorial site. There were actually 7 buildings that fell - we only knew about the 2 big towers (Kat wasn't in the US for 9/11 so she didn't get the entire coverage of the event). There was a guy who was there standing with a bottle of change talking wildly to all the passers-by, he was telling 9/11 stories. Kat thought he was a crazy homeless man. We didn't stay to listen to him, unfortunate because we found out later on a posting that he was there every day since 9/11 explaining to school groups and bystanders what really happened and background and what happened immediately afterwards. That is his mission in life now, he tries to make a living from the change in the bottle...

We went to Coney Island - saw the boardwalk and piers with the ferris wheels and amusement park. It was so cute - all of a sudden Swen came running up to me and exclaimed "that guy just called me dude! No one has ever called me dude before!" A guy was fishing and looked behind him before casting off and said "take care, dude". Welcome to America, Swen! Just wait till we go to California!

The part we liked best was Brooklyn, Spanish Harlem, all the parts of town with more color, like a gangster movies. Hip kids strutting down the street like gangsters going into little restaurants. The people were all very friendly, we weren't scared or nervous. One night we had walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and were looking for the subway station and were surprised to be advised by an older man that we shouldn't walk to the closer station because there weren't many people around there and it would be better for us to walk to another station a little farther away - and it was only 7pm. The life in these areas is much more interesting than the fancy, "sophisticated" parts of Manhattan.

One night we went for dinner with Kat's friend Rina who she went to midwifery school with and is now living in Brooklyn and working in a hospital. We wanted to bring a bottle of wine and surprisingly had a hard time finding a liquor store that was open. Finally we found one that was open - it was like a high security bank. The clerk was behind bullet proof glass, all the alcohol was behind this glass, you had to scream at her through the glass and point to tell her which bottle you wanted. So we picked out a $10 bottle of wine, paid, and suddenly a gangster guy asked us if he could pay for the bottle as he had just won $2000 on a scratch-off lottery ticket! He was so happy he won, he wanted to buy us our drink, but as we had already paid he just gave us a $10 bill and wished us a goodnight!

The hostel we stayed at was a bit of a headache - they charged us more than was advertised and we had paid for on the internet when we made the reservations. One night we came home to find a guy sleeping in Swen's bed - seems they overbooked, so the guy moved all Swen's stuff off and jumped in! The office was a big mess, and the owners and most of the office staff were not very friendly as we argued over the bill and the occupied bed. Except for one guy - a Romanian man who had been living in NY for 20 years and had just started on his first shift in the hostel. When we left he helped us carry our luggage (a frightening load of 2 big back packs, a bike in a box, and 2 smaller bags) the 4 blocks to the subway to our relief. We started talking about peoples attitudes towards eachother, he told of his previous work with the UN in East Timor and the Balkan States, that he just divorced his wife and was on his way to visit his kids. And of all the many many people in NY that he has met who have never even left the island of Manhattan because they still think that Brooklyn and The Bronx are still very dangerous neighborhoods full of drugs and violence. He wished us a good bike trip and we are on our way to the airport, to New Mexico! A new chapter begins!

mehr fotos von New York findet ihr wenn ihr hier klickt -- click here for some fotos of New York