A last look at Manhattan

posted in: Travel | 0

After our less than salutary experience with the hotel’s breakfast the previous day, we went off to find a café nearby that offered breakfast. This would be our last day in New York. We were heading for Washington the next day. We spent a fun morning enjoying some of the quirkier bits of the city. And another quick trip to Central Park, though not for long.

Toy Story characters. I suppose a bit like the dress-up Roman soldiers at the Colosseum
A Jewish tailor working on his sewing machine. It illustrates what used to happen in that area of New York
I don’t know what Christian sect they belonged to. They sang beautifully and offered free christian literature right outside H&R Block.

We headed back to the hotel so we’d be ready to meet a friend. My editor, Diane, lives in Pennsylvania and she had agreed to catch a bus to New York so that we could actually meet. I was looking forward to that. I’ve met a few online friends in real life and always found it very comfortable. We’d already met at an intellectual level, so this was just a matter of putting a face to a person. We returned to our room and waited for her to call from the lobby.

It was the weekend and a bunch of girls in their early teens were booked into the hotel. I assume it was a school group on an excursion. When Diane rang to say she’d arrived, I caught a lift to go down to meet her. We were on something like the 23rd floor and when I entered, the lift held about four people. From there on down it was stopping at all stations. More and more kids entered the lift. I was at the rear, my back now firmly pressed against the wall. Bear in mind I’m an introvert with a tendency to claustrophobia. When the lift stopped again I felt sure you couldn’t fit another person in that car. The kid didn’t agree, though, winkling her way into that scrum while I begged all the deities I don’t believe in not to let the lift breakdown.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief when we finally reached the ground floor and everybody poured out. It must have looked like one of those Benny Hill sketches where far too many people climb out of a mini or something.

Diane was lovely, of course.

After a while we decided we’d head for New York’s natural history museum, easily reachable on the subway. We bought tickets and sat down. After a couple of stations an announcement was made via the PA. It seems to be a requisite for railway stations that all announcements are unintelligible. We stayed where we were and the train started off again. And picked up speed and zipped through stations. It seemed that the powers that be had decided that this train would be an express. We seemed to go a long way before the brakes came on and the train halted. We piled off and watch the rear carriage disappear into the tunnel. Now what? The sign said Harlem. Gosh. We’d heard all about Harlem back in Oz, not the best place to be. Oh well, All we really wanted was to know how to get back toward the central city. Reading signs didn’t help much. In the end Diane went and asked a passing lady and returned to report we had to go over the bridge to a different platform.

A train soon arrived and we climbed into a packed carriage, where we were forced to stand. One young woman sitting on a bench made to get up. “One of you can have my seat.”

“Nah,” we all said. “It’s okay. We’re not going far.”

Pete being Pete added. “One of us can sit on your knee.”

She looked us over for a second, decided we were a trio of harmless old coots, and patted her lap.” Okay. Which one of you?”

All of us laughed.

This episode stuck in my mind and a couple of years later, a suitably embellished version of this experience (along with Central Park) was used in my urban fantasy novel, White Tiger. Did you know that there are more tigers living in America than out in the wild? They’re kept as pets in backyard zoos – or even backyards in often unsuitable conditions, although thankfully, the number of states that permit the keeping of wild animals has reduced. It’s a fact that somebody actually kept a pet tiger in an apartment in Harlem. I wove that (fictionalised) into White Tiger as well.

Ahem. Back to New York, 2011.

We got off the train at the natural history museum and spent several enjoyable hours wandering through the exhibits.The museum is excellent, with fantastic displays of skeletons, reconstructions, explanations of evolution. There are other sections displaying Mayan, Incan, and Native American artefacts.

Triceratops skeleton
The evolution of the horse – much more complicated than the simple straight line that we were told about when I was young
Eohippus – the dawn horse
Part of the Ican exhibition

Then we went to find dinner. It seemed every restaurant we went to either didn’t do much for us, or didn’t have a table. We ended up back at the Irish pub where, if memory serves me right, Diane had shepherd’s pie for the first time. Later, we walked Di back to the bus station, then went back to our hotel to prepare to catch a train to Washington the next day.

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