Around about Downtown Manhattan

Hey all, back again with an update from the last couple of days.

Unfortunately, flickr connection is still borked, so still no photos :(

So, I've spent a good part of the  last couple days hanging out with fellow Australians Alice and Bonnie, and I've greatly enjoyed having awesome people to chat to and see things with (not to mention having someone to take pictures of me in front of New York skylines - very important, that.)

Yesterday, after a bit of stupidity on my part (left my mobile at my hostel, had to return to Brooklyn to get it in order to arrange to meet), we caught up at Battery Park, at the Southern tip of Manhattan Island.  After taking in the excellent view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, we walked up through downtown, past Wall St and the New York Stock Exchange, to the City Hall and Civic Centre. We then braved the crowds to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, a spectacular structure, built in 1875, with an equally special view of both Downtown and Midtown Manhattan. After a stop for lunch on the Brooklyn side, we paid a visit to the incredibly picturesque Central Park, which is especially spectacular at its Southern end, with skyscrapers as a backdrop to the pond and landscaped beauty of the place. After a visit to the Apple Cube (Which I think I mentioned a few days ago) and FAO Schwartz, plus a walk through the bright, flashing landscape of Times Square, the girls were ready to call it a day. Before I headed back to Brooklyn for the night, I took the oppurtunity to do a bit of exploring in Midtown, and some night photography - if Flickr was working, this would be the point where I posted an amazing shot of the East River and Queensboro bridge which I stumbled upon in my walkings. Instead, you'll just have to imagine it, and take my word that the view was -amazing-.

Today, my morning was taken up with more mundane tasks - specifically, laundry - which I hadn't done since I left San Francisco. That out of the way, I headed into Manhattan, taking a long walk in the low-rise neighbourhoods between between Midtown and Downtown. Starting in Chinatown, I visited Little Italy, Noho, Soho, Chelsea, the West Village, Greenwich Village, and probably some other neighbourhoods that I didn't even know were there. Later in the afternoon I met up again wit Alice and Bonnie, who had spent the day at museums which I'd already hit up. We endured the long lines at Magnolia Cupcakes (Made famous, I'm informed, on Sex and the City), but the resulting sweets were well worth the wait - I mean, I don't use the term 'best cupcakes ever', but damn, these were really good cupcakes :P.

After another early night on the part of my travelling companions, I again took a night-time wander in this wonderful city. Taking the Subway South to 34th street, I paid a visit to the base of the Empire State Building (line was too long to consider going up), then moved on to 'the biggest store in the world', Macy's New York. Certainly, this is an enourmous store, and it has a lot of old-school charm. Of particular note were the wooden escalators throughout the uooer floors - I've never seen escalators that old before, and I suppose that through a combination of nostalgia and inertia (if it ain't broke...), they're still there in Macy's, running just as well as you'd expect an escalator to run.

After a wander through Macy's I realised that I hadn't, during this visit, been to see the famous flatiron building. Anyway, I felt like a walk, so I schlepped down Broadway, took in the flatiron by night, then continued down to my subway stop at 14th St.

Well, that's all from me for the time being. Big plans for tomorrow - it looks like it might snow in the morning, we've got a visit to the Rockerfeller Centre Observation Deck lined up, and, of course, New Year's Eve in Times Square.

Might not get back to the blog for a couple days, and New Year's Day has me taking the train to Boston, MA, where I'll be staying for a few days.

'til then!

Jono

More New York

Hey again, just wanted to drop back in and say hello, and get y'all updated on goings-on over the last couple of days.

Unfortunately, no photos today - having some flickr-issues at the moment, and my uploads aren't going through.

So, yesterday, I got up earlyish and made my way out to Coney Island. Site of the original Luna Park, Coney Island was a popular beachside resort and day-trip destination for New Yorkers in the early 20th century. On a downnhill slide since after the 2nd world-war, most of the original theme parks and fairgrounds were long ago replaced my moderate-income and public housing. A few places survived along the waterfront, but last summer's closure of Astroland Park effectively spells the end of the area as an amusement park destination (there is, of course, still a beach, and the New York Aquarium is here).

So, I went out here mostly out of curiosity, to get a look at the retro-decay and degeneration. The parks that are still open always shut down for the winter anyway, but on a foggy day like Saturday, the whole place looks almost ghostly - appropriately enough, like it might just fade away into the mist. It's kinda sad, of course, to see a such a significant place slowly melting away, but there's little to be done if people don't want to visit anymore.

Another famous Coney Island sight is Nathan's famous hot of stand. Established in 1915, Nathan holds an annual hot dog eating contest - you know the one, on the news every year, with the little Japanese guy absolutely dominating a whole bunch of huge American dudes. Well, I paid a visit to Nathan's and tried one of their famous hot dogs. The verdict? Not bad, but I couldn't eat 63 in 10 minutes :P

So, the original plan for yesterday afternoon as to meet up with a friend of a friend, Alice, who's on her own epic international trip, and is here in New York for New Years. Unfortunately, true to form, American Airlines failed abjectly, and left the poor girl sitting in San Francisco Airport for 9-odd hours. At any rate, my Saturday evening was more pleasant than being stuck in transit all day, and I spent some time exploring midtown Manhattan at night - rather spectacular when the fog is as low as it was yesterday evening, shrouding tall buildings and reflecting city lights.

By this morning, Alice had made it to New York, so we met up for Breakfast on the Upper Weest Side. After breakfast, we hit up the Natural History Museum, which was a strange experience indeed. To me, the Museum of Natural History is something of a meta-museum - a museum of what museums were like in the early-mid 20th century. eschewing the interactive, interpretive exhibit of many more modern museums (think of the Melbourne Museum, for example), the museum of natural history is old school. Like, stuffed animals, dioramas, human skeletons and exhibits called 'The African People' and 'The Asian People'. This really is a retro-experience - even an exhibit on the new-fangled concept of 'biodiversity' can't resist such charming inclusions as a stuffed Panda and a Dodo skeleton. Hardly a great contribution to biodiversity there. The natural history museum, incidentally, is the setting for that Ben Stiller movie, Night at the Museum.

Next stop was on the other side of the park, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the largest museum store I've ever seen (they sell rugs, for goodness sake), they've got a huge building, housing an enourmous collection spanning the whole gamut from ancient pottery through Roman and Greek, Renaissance, Impressionist and Contemporary Art (including the only Damien Hirst I've ever seen - the piece where he suspended a whole shark in a tank of formaldehyde (kinda reminded me of the Natural History Museum :P). After spending a couple of hours wandering through that particularly impressive collection, we took a subway South and paid a brief visit to Roosevelt Island (which I wrote about a couple of days ago) right around sunset. I'll tell you what - if that place is spectacular by day, it's even more amazing with all the lights going. Quite a sight indeed.

A quick visit to Times Square for dinner rounded off a fun and productive day - Alice's travelling companion arrives tomorrow morning (again, scheduled to arrive this evening, but not to be), and I think we'll be hitting up the bottom part of Manhattan Island - Bryant Park, the Empire State Building, Battery Park etc.

'til next time!

Jono

Christmas in New York

While it was always going to be hard being away from home on Christmas day, if you're gonna be anywhere at such a time, it might as well be New York. So what did I get up to on Christmas? Well, after a bit of sleep-in, I took a walk along the East River, on the East Side of Manhattan. A pathway, of varying quality, runs all the way along the edge of the island from where I joined it, around 6th street, all the way up to 40somethingth street. One of my favourite things about this city (or any city, really), is that is has so many different faces and aspects - depending on where you see it from, there's an infinite number of beautiful views to be had - plus, in New York, you can look across the river and see Brooklyn, an impressive city in and of itself.

Diverting from the shoreline, I made my way into the North end of midtown, past the Citicorp centre (the giant, slope-roofed one in the skyline shot above), and found a couple of stores that were open on Christmas afternoon - one was that Apple store (Which is housed in a bunker underneath a hyper-futuristic glass cube, and literally never closes (24 hours a day, 365 days a year)). The other was even better then - the world's most famous toy store, FAO Schwartz was open, so I took the time to go in, have a wander around and see the famous giant keyboard (As famously seen in the Tom Hanks movie Big).

After a giant pretzel from one of the ubiquitous street-cart vendors (possibly my favourite New York photo so far, btw), I took a quick stroll through the southernmost part of Central Park. Despite the warmer weather, the surface of the lake was still frozen. It's a beautiful place, Central Park, and plays so well off of its uber-urban surroundings.

Heading back downtown, I came to Times Square, which is just as crazy a place as you might imagine - they reckon that half a million people pass through there in a day, which explains the cacophany of flashing lights, huge video screens and 10-storey billboards. It's like Las Vegas compressed into three blocks. Or maybe Las Vegas is Times Square spread out over a whole city - either way, with that number of computers and video screens in all packed into one place, something is bound to malfunction eventually :P

So it seems that Christmas Day is big movie release day today, so my plans to go See Gran Torino were disturbed by a sold out session. My alternative, while not exactly festive, turned out to be one of the best movies I've seen all year - Doubt, with Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is pretty dark, but really excellent.

My Christmas Day was topped off by a nice meal at a restaurant nearby (including a very classy hamburger, and a ridiculously indulgent desert - espresso ice-cream, punctuated by chunks of brownie, topped with whipped cream and bookended by caramel-coated peanuts - yum!), then back to the hostel for an early night's sleep.

Today, I spent some time indulging some of my geekier habits. A morning visit to an awesome used video-game store was fun, followed by a trip to Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan to visit the Skyscraper Museum - student entry cost me two bucks fifty, and I spent almost an hour and a half in their one gallery - an exhibit about Hong Kong and New York kept me occupied for that long - what a bargain! Although I must admit that some of that hour and a half was spent in the museum store, wishing I could afford a 3200 piece skyscraper modelling kit :P. I rounded out the day with a trip to the P.S.1 contemporary art centre (my MOMA ticket got me in for free - it really was a thrifty day!). P.S.1 is really interesting, actually - it's a real, 29th century school building which has been retooled into a gallery - some of the spaces feel like ordinary galleries, but others are woven into the building - including one 'gallery' which is actually the old boiler-room, with furnace intact (but sadly inoperative :P).

All in all, then, a good couple of days - I'm still loving experiencing and exploring this city, and its many, many faces.

The streets of Manhattan

Bugger.

Well, somehow I appear to have just lost a whole bunch of writing I just did for this thing, so the following is a spark notes version of my last couple of days in New York City.

On Tuesday, I walked downtown, and did my architecture-geek thing, peering up at all the famous (and just plain impressive) buildings at the bottom end of Manhattan Island.

Plus, the view from down there, of New Jersey, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are mighty impressive.

Next, I headed back uptown to Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the East River. The two notable attributes of Roosevelt Island: #1 - The Aerial Tramway which serves the island.

#2 - the views. Which are incredible - from Roosevelt Island, the Upper East Side of Manhattan looks like a man-made mountain of concrete and glass and steel. Just stunning.

A return to the bigger island by subway took me to the Rockerfeller Centre, which is perfect at this time of year for a festive fix - ice skating, bright lights, a giant christmas tree and thousands of people all in the one place.

Additionally, I'd like to throw out that the main building (used to be called the RCA building, now it's the GE building) of the Rockerfeller Centre (which stretches over several blocks of Midtown Manhattan) is quite possibly my favourite skyscraper full stop. Which (for me at least), is a big call :P. But I really love it - it's tall, and long, and oriented such that, from the North or South, it takes up a whole block, whereas from the East or West it's so narrow you hrdly see it at all - it's like a sleek, beautiful, art-deco, 270-odd metre tall stone cliff face - like something that would be eroded out of a mountain, rather than being built. Just wonderful.

Anyway, after all that excitement, today(Christmas Eve) was a somewhat more subdued day. I went out to the Museum of Modern Art in the morning, and boy, was it ever busy! I got there 20-odd minutes before it opened, but the line for tickets already stretched out the door. There must've been 1000 plus people in the museum at any one time - place was packed. They've got a great collection, though. I'm no art-expert, but it's great to see some of the uber-famous pieces, like Van Gogh's Starry Night, and Warhol's Soup Can paintings. 

This afternoon, I took a wander through the Greenwich Village neighbourhood, which is charming, but terribly confusing - because it predates the regular street grid (parallel numbered streets running East-West, parallel numbered avenues running North-South) you find further up the island, you get wierd things happening - I gave up trying to navigate when 4th street intersected with 10th street -_-.

So, those were my eventful couple of days - I'm still having a blast over here, and learning more abou the city every day. Tomorrow's Christmas Day, and my plans include a sleep-in (so much walking the last couple of days!), a movie in the evening, then a nice meal.

A merry Christmas to y'all, hope it's a good one!

'til next time.

Jono

Live from New York!

Hy all, I'm coming to ya tonight direct from Brooklyn, New York - and starting to remember just why I liked this city so much the first time around.

So, after spending a bit of time over the weekend taking in a last bit of San Francisco, I packed up my stuff from the frat and headed out to SFO airport.

I had an overnight flight, leaving San Francisco at quarter to eight at night and reaching JFK airport in New York at about 7:30 the next morning. In the end, due to various delays, the trip turned out to be somewhat longer - but in the end, I left the airport a little before ten this morning. Hopped a taxi to my hostel, which is in a very cool part of town, Brooklyn is on Long Island, across the river from Manhattan, and I'm staying in East Williamsburg. For the Melbournites amongst us, this area is a bit like a less gentrified Brunswick - lots of galleries, converted lofts and creative types, spotted by low-income housing and a few industries and warehouses which are still running. Except that Williamsburg is on a much greater scale than you'd find in Melbourne. The Hostel I'm staying in is a converted loft, and they've done an amazing job. My room sleeps 12, but the space is so huge, you're not cramped in with everyone, as you get in many hostels. It's all very new, and there's a cool lounge/kitchen space, with new appliances and fittings.

Anyway, after dropping my stuff of at the hostel, I had some time to kill before I could check in. So I hopped the subway (like a block and a half away from the hostel) and did what I always do when I arrive in a new city - walked around - so a bit of a photosummary is in order.

So, after a 15 minutes ride to Union Square on Manhattan, I took a walk up the famous Park avenue - no photos of this, I'm afraid, I was still in cold-shock at the time, and was more focused on getting something hot and breakfasty (two eggs and bacon on a roll saved my morning  today :P). Made my way up to Grand Central Terminal, which is probably the most impressive train station I've ever seen - and it's not just a pretty face - there are dozens of trains which arrive and depart from here, and hundreds of people at a time coming and going.

The great thing about actually being in New York is that something spectacular and iconic is always just around the corner - case in point, I walk out of Grand Central, and run into this baby.

Yup, that's the Chrysler Tower, quite possibly the most elegant, beautiful skyscraper in the world - and in New York, it's just there, all the time, ready to be seen and admired.

Not one to quickly move on from unhealthy obsessions, I soonfound another building to fawn over - this time, one that I had missed out on during my first trip here. The UN secretariat building, as well as being pretty and architecturally significant, is also a place where a whole lot of good work goes on - which lend the whole thing a certain gravitas, I reckon.

(see the gravitas :P)

Plus, there's an amazing view down the street (42nd? I think.) from outside - there are not very many places in the world where you can have a view like the following, with such a variety of buildings in all different styles, shapes, ages, heights and sizes.

Next, I took a walk across the island from East to West, ending up on the Hudson River, where I saw the aircraft USS Intrepid (Which I only knew about because I'd seen Will Smith use it as a driving range in I Am Legend). 

Again, I feel compelled to point out that, no matter where you are in New York, there always seems to be an amazing view just around the corner - this one's taken at the West Side train yards, with the new New York Times Building at left, and the Empire State in the middle there.

Anyway, I made my way back to the subway via the East Village neighbourhood (nice, but far too many hipsters/yuppies/fashionistas) and hopped on a train back to Brooklyn.

So, that was my eventful day - got a few things planned over the next few days - Roosevelt Island, Wall St/Downtown, Central Park, the Rockerfeller Centre, Museum of Modern Art, Coney Island etc - but mostly I'm just looking to spend a bit of time doing exactly what I was up to today - wandering, exploring and being in awe of this crazy, crazy city.

'til then,

Jono

Reboot

Hey y'all

After a hectic couple of months, a lot of schoolwork, a lot of assignments and a lot of fun, I'm officially all finished - with finals, with my studies here at Berkeley and, in fact, with my Arts degree. Which feels good. Anyway, I'm now officially in holiday mode.

So, between now and when I return (Jan 16th), I've got some travelling to do. New York, Boston and Chicago are the places on my hit list - flying out to New York tomorrow evening, and then making my way back across the breadth of the United States by train. Which I'm thoroughly looking forward to. So, itinerary.

Itinerary, December 21 – January 16


21/12: Depart San Francisco Airport, 7:45PM, Transfer at Las Vegas

22/12: Arrive New York, 7:30AM

22/12 – 31/12: Overnight, New York Loft Hostel, Brooklyn

1/1: Depart Penn Station, New York, 1PM, on train to Boston

1/1 – 4/1: Overnight, HI Hostel Boston

5/1 – 6/1: Depart Boston South Station for Chicago @ 11:55, arrive Union Station, Chicago, 9:45AM, 6/1

6/1 – 11/1: Overnight, HI Hostel Chicago

11/1 – 13/1: Depart Chicago Union Station for Los Angeles @ 3:15PM, Arrive Union Station, Los Angeles, 8:15AM, 13/1

13/1: Overnight, Super 8 Hotel, Los Angeles Airport

14/1: Depart Los Angeles Airport @ 1:50PM, return to Melbourne via Taipei, Brisbane.

16/1: Arrive Melbourne Airport @ 3:40PM

As you can see, there's a lot of time spent on the train in there (I count almost 70 hours total), but I actually really enjoyed the train trip up here from Los Angeles, and it's more scenic than flying and cheaper than hiring a car. So that's the gist of my next few weeks - Now that I've got more free time, I'll make sure to keep this thing good and updated with all of my adventures in three exciting American cities.