And the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond
Across a cash crop car lot,
filled with twilight Coupe Devilles.
Leaving the town in the keeping
Of the one who is sweeping
Up the ghosts of Saturday night.

So I woke up this morning, dodged the crowd watching Good Morning America being filmed on the sidewalk (there was a man in a suit – famous??) and caught a downtown train to Battery Park. It’s a nice park.

That’s is the Sphere, a sculpture recovered from the World Trade Center site.

So I decided to go to the world famous New York Explosives And Weapons Terrorism Screening Experience, otherwise known as the Statue of Liberty. Here’s what happens:

Join queue
Get shouted at by security staff
Empty your pockets into a plastic tub and remove your belt
Hand over your bag
Have your laptop swabbed for explosives
Get your stuff back
Get to island on boat
Join queue to enter queue to enter marquee
In marquee, join queue
Repeat steps 2-5, but with added step of having a machine blow you with air for some reason
Enjoy the Statue of “Liberty”

Hoho, do you see the irony? I certainly did. While I have no problem with unobtrusive searching and scanning for reasons of security, the whole setup was excessive and, what is worse, rudely done.

New York is so incredibly rude. Well, it’s not really: it’s just straight-talking and matter of fact. Whereas in Blighty it’d be “Excuse me sir, please stand to the side so that I might do you the inconvenience of searching your bag” or “Please kindly proceed along at a steady pace, thank you, sorry that I am shouting”, it’s all “Sir, over here. Give me your bag.” Or “Go faster! Keep moving! Don’t slow up!”

Anyway, after the ferry got there, I wandered around the island for a bit:

Before deciding that I might as well visit the pedestal since I’d paid $12 for this. Inside were plenty of annoying kids and annoying adults, but also a reasonably interesting history of the Statue. Being a total nerd, of course, I kept comparing the pedestal to its depiction in Deus Ex (where it is overrun with terrorists who are either anarchists or libertarians, depending on which side of the fence you are on). I swear I found the point where there’s a particularly annoying gas mine set up.

So, Statue done, I returned to the mainland and wandered up Wall Street to the World Trade Center site. And here it is. Here’s where the 21st century started off.

It is, as you might expect… well, nothing. There’s nothing there/ There’s no trace that anything ever happened there, it could just be any building site. I was expecting more of a reaction to it, but really …

Luckily I bought a delicious papaya milkshake, which began the day’s odyssey of trying to find something to quench my thirst. (Snapple from a gruff hot dog cart owner (“Snapple is two dollar.”), milkshakes, smoothies: nothing seems to have done the trick.)

From there, then, I continued to J&R, an independent electronics shop which was pretty disappointing in terms of selection, but then I guess nothing can compete with the internet these days. To Macy’s, which also disappointed. A floor of perfume counters does nothing for me. I don’t really know what happened after that. I got two seasons apiece of Venture Bros and Sealab 2021 for $70 in Virgin, found an NHL store where I nearly bought a Red Wings jersey but then I felt that maybe I should go for Calgary instead but it was $99 and I’m not really into hockey any more and furthermore the greeter scared me off (what a strange concept these greeters are: you’re like “uh, are they talking to me? What do I say back?”), wandered around looking for something to drink, bought a double quarter pounder (what a country!) and felt sick from it, and now I’m hitting travel fatigue, because I can’t really be bothered to do anything. It’s a tough business, travelling, and I just want to lie down and relax, not go traipsing off to find Bloomingdales and navigate the damn subway some more. Who knew going on holiday would be this difficult?

With a spare evening, I decided I might as well go to the cinema. Saw the new Hulk film at a glitzy place slightly off Broadway called AMC Empire or something. Verdict: a big resounding meh. It was enlightening to see a film in an American cinema though: a lot more hooting, laughing, clapping, etc. Also, it was very odd to watch a film set in New York, what with New York being just outside.

Wandered back through the sweltering hot streets around Times Square and it occurred to me that New York is like a giant movie set, only with no director or scriptwriter. Rather, you have a million actors, each with an ego the size of Staten Island, and you’ve dropped them into Manhattan and told them to do improv everywhere, and so as you stroll down Broadway you come across a series of increasingly strange vignettes: a pair of Jewish guys kvetching about schlock, a man shouting into his phone: “Fuck Tony, I don’t need Tony!”, a couple of cops joking about how one of them apparently got beaten up by a drunk… That’s New York.