Last Day in NY - Just Chillin'

It was our last day in New York before we would pack our bags and go to our final destination, Boston, where we will meet my good friends Al and Hilary. As a consequence, we were just chillin' a bit.

While we made our way to Central Park one last time to have a packed lunch, Isi and I reflected on our stay in New York. NY is kinda awesome and kind of not. The city is a lot of fun and as a student I am sure it is great to be here, as there is always something happening, but it is also a very good way to do a deep dive into debts.

A very pensive lunch with my love, Isabel... Yes, I know, I look as sophisticated and sharp as ever.

The place is completely overpriced in every aspect you can think. We went to the Museum of the History of the City of New York and one of the first sentences of the museum guide hit the nail directly on the head.

"New York was from the very beginning, more than 400 years ago, about making money, and this has not changed to this very day."

You could not be any more correct. Yesterday's tour guide for the movie tours casually talked about rent control and how to do it here in New York, because of the unrealistic living arrangements of the friends in "Friends". She casually dropped that she paid $3000 each month for rent and that is a good deal, because her neighbour above her pays triple that.

The four things that make New York New York - Check it, Money is right on the top

Apart from that, during the museum something was confirmed that we sadly already knew. The British were during their colonization heyday a big bunch of bullies and dickheads. The Dutch arrived in New Netherlands and formed New Amsterdam and rose to success under Petrus Stuyvesant. The Dutch were the ones, who bought the land from the native Indians for ca. $24.

Their success was so enormous, that the British who settled further up North thought to themselves, I'll have me that and then let's kill the natives, too, for good measure and take all the riches back to Mother England...
If this sounds familiar, it is possible because they did similar things most notably on the subcontinent of India, South Africa and I believe Australia, too. In New Zealand they tried, but encountered such heavy resistance from the Maoris, that they decided to make contracts...

In hindsight, while we were having our lunch in the park watching the far too comfortable squirrels and birds run and fly near humans to get food, we figured that the New York experience was very cool. Something that you need to have done, but we would not want to live here. As we said, it is too expensive and what is probably just as bad, there is no real nature within a 2 hour drive from the city. Our sweet deal with a house in the country side with cows behind the fence is not exactly possible here. For that sort of stuff, you would easily pay a rent of $40000 here in NY.

These squirrels are absolutely everywhere. They are much keen and less fearful than their European red-haired cousins

Kinda proud I got a shot like this...

Having said that, I would not miss it for the world that we have watched Cats, that we walked through Time Square at night with all its madness and that we have been to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on a sunny day.

Good times, but I don't think we will plan to come here again. Never say never, maybe there will be a congress here or something along those lines, but I think we will focus more in US countryside for vacation if at all.

All Aboard! Next Stop... Boston!!!

NYC Movie Tour

Isi and I were looking forward to today's NYC TV and Movie Tours. It is a guided tour of many on site locations for TV shows and movies across New York.

The interesting part that I did not know, about 10 years ago, I cannot remember the exact time the tour guide stated, the mayor of NYC passed a law that made it very cheap to film in New York. As I said, I cannot remember the exact details, but if at least 75% of the show or TV was filmed in NY, you can save on a lot of cost. In addition, as long as noone of the crew is interacting with the building, it is perfectly acceptable to film the facades of buildings in New York State.

What is the relevance of this little tid-bit of information, you might ask... Well, let us say it like this. When that particular tour guide started to do those tours ca. 14 years ago, there were 4 TV shows actively shooting in NY, now there are 53 (!!!) shows. It brings a lot of work to the city, so it was a rather clever move to make by the mayor at the time and other US cities such as Boston are now trying to copy the concept.

Because of this, you actually see a lot of buildings in TV shows and movies, that were actually filmed or set elsewhere. As a consequence, we tried to keep up, but there were just so many locations, it was unbelievable. Just to name a few TV shows or movies that I actually remember: Men in Black, I am Legend, Ghostbusters I, II and 2016, Friends, Sleepless in Seattle, Kevin alone in New York, Two Broke Girls, How I Met Your Mother, White Collar, 30 Rock, When Harry Met Sally, Breakfast At Tiffany's, Sex & The City, Seinfeld, etc. etc.

Our tour guide was awesome and it seemed that she watched so much TV that she was able to recite every iconic scene of every TV show and movie. When passing by the "Original Soup Man" Place, which is said to be the inspiration for the Soup Nazi in the show Seinfeld, she actually recited the entire dialogue just for us. Well, she said, she worked also as an actress... Go figure ;)
If you cannot remember Seinfeld and the Soup Nazi, below is a youtube clip for you ;)

Of course, we came by a bunch of place, where we could take pictures as well. We'll show our image first and then you can try to guess in what move you have seen it. I will go chronologically, just to want you. Some of them are quite hard...

Shot #1

This one is admittedly quite very difficult. Can you guess?

 

Will Smith lived here in a "I Am Legend"

Shot #2

This is Arc is shown in a loooot of movies... Do you recognise it?

 

Here in "When Harry Met Sally"

Again, "I Am Legend"

In addition, to the shots that I found, it was also used in "Person of Interest", "Glee" and the TV show "Elementary", just to name a few more.

Shot #3

This one is nigh on impossible, because of all the scaffolding, so I give you the solution right below

That's right, boys and girls. If there's something strange, and it don't look good... Who d'you gonna call?!?

 Shot #4

This is a shot of the "Wedge Building". A famous landmark of New York (actually taken 2 days earlier from the Empire State Building)... Now where do you see that building in a movie?

 
 

That's right! The Daily Bugle, Peter Parker's aka Spiderman's Employer has its head quarters in the Wedge Building :)

 
Shot #5

This building was seen at least 24 times each year for 10 years in one of the most successful TV shows of all time... The owner is still annoyed that he did not see a single penny for it, because of New York legislature...

It is the bulding that was supposed to host the appartments of "Friends" You see shots of the building from all angles over the course of a 10 year period.

These were all the shots that we made, but please believe me when I say, there were many... many more possible ones. Apart from that we also learned that New Yorker enjoy abbreviations, such as Tribeca quarter, which is home to most celebrities living in New York. Because Broadway does not follow the grid system, it crosses streets and crossings at odd angles.
The name Tribeca is a result of that. It describes the TRIangle BElow CAnal street *facepalm*. The show How I met your Mother makes fun of that habit, by creating the imaginary neighbourhood "Dowisetrepla" (DOwnWInd of the SEwage TREatment PLAnt).

We finished the tour by having lunch at McGee's the pub that inspired McLaren's pub in How I Met Your Mother. The pub does not look anything like McLaren's in the TV show, but they have cocktail names inspired by episodes of the show, as you can see below.



The remainder of the day, Isi went shopping in NYC until we both were sick of Time Square and we let the day conclude with a beer in one of the bars in our Brooklyn neighbourhood.

Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island

Today we visited the Statue of Liberty :-) ^_^

We had to start early for this one, so we made our way to the Battery Park in the Financial District of Manhattan where the Ferry leaves for Liberty Island... yes, it is really called Liberty Island. The trip also included a visit to Ellis Island, which was the place were in the late 19th century and early 20th century all the immigrants had to pass through, before they could enter the USA.

To give you an idea of the area, I embedded the google map below.


It was a super sunny day, the first one of its kind since we arrived on the shores of this new land. Let's be clear right from the start about this. This is a tourist trap... maybe even the mother of all tourist traps. We knew this when we went in, but we wanted to see Lady Liberty up close.

Knowing all this, we expected the completely overfilled boats bringing you from A to B and we were nicely surprised by the reasonable $18.50 per person for a ticket for the Statue and its Pedestal and also access to the Immigration museum on Ellis Island. The $5 per ice cone were already a given.

An overfilled boat if I ever saw one

Having said all that, visiting the Statue was very cool. When seeing it from afar it admittedly looks tiny, because of all the sky scrapers on the neighbouring islands, but back when it was built in 1884, it actually was the tallest building around.

As usual, with buildings like these, there was some kind of political undercurrent. In this case, the French gave it to the Americans as a sign of their friendship, but also to critisise their own government to go back to more freedom and liberal views.

The image that is instilled on every viewer is the one that millions of immigrants from the old world went onto a steamboat for roughly two weeks in cramped quarters and the first that they would see from the new world was in fact Lady Liberty. Powerful imagery indeed, and that is how the Statue became the symbol that it is now.

The view of the Statue from the Boat

View on Manhattan from the Statue's Pedestal

Proof! Isi was on Liberty Island

The second stop was Ellis Island, where the old Immigrations Office was converted to a museum and you could walk the way of all new arrivals from Europe. In addition, they talked about the immigration process and becoming a US citizen.

Funny quote from an Italian immigrant

It was rather weird, because they talked about the process of become a US citizen (they called it "Naturalization") as something that is very simple and easy to achieve. There is one test that you have to do about history of the US etc. We did the multiple choice test of 10 questions and scored 6/10, therefore we passed and could become US citizen :-P.

After we went back, we came across one more wonder of the US, differently flavoured Fanta. In one of our less lucid moments, we decided to buy one of each and rank them according to taste. We found orange (we took it as the standard), the in the order below, pineapple, mango, strawberry and berry.

Below you can see in pictures what our verdict was...

Judge Isi

Traditionalist Isi prefers orange above all

Berry and strawberry was best for Judge Johannes

China Town, Cats on Broadway and Time Square by Night

Today, we were looking forward to the musical Cats. andrew Lloyd Webber's classic musical about... a bunch of cats. I cannot describe it any better.

Before that happened, we had a look at Chinatown, the infamous NY Chinatown. Spoiler alert, it is pretty much like any other Chinatown I have seen so far. We could not find the usual Chinese Arch though :(
Walking through a Chinatown is always a funny experience for me. I suddenly seem to noticeably grow in comparison to my surrounding fellow humans. During my gigantesque feeling, I come across a food shop that sells strange, yet edible creations advertised by a small, Asian lady (this time young) in broken English. This time it was Isi's turn. She had a bizarre Black Tea with Milk on Ice with black pieces in it that should create bubbles. And as usual, it looked interested, but in the end was not that tasty.
We closed our visit off with a meal at a Vietnamese restaurant which was absolutely delicious, but I could not tell you what I had for the life of me ;)

Isi and the mysterious tea-like beverage

We decided to walk the 30 minutes from Chinatown to the theatres on Broadway going through NoHo (North of Houston Street... Yes and SoHo is South of Houston Street), a surprisingly quiet almost residential area with a lot of trees and wide streets. And when you think that New York can't get weirder, you come across a boat put into the side of a building on the 3rd floor or so (check out the picture).

Why on earth is there a boat?!?

While walking, we noticed something very odd about NY; the traffic lights at each crossroad actually not only slow down the cars, but the pedestrians, too. We were running a bit late and we wanted to walk a bit faster. Plainly spoken: Impossible. Too many people and especially, too many friggin' traffic lights.
Also, some things you see can only be described as odd at first sight, such as this news reporter who needed to make herself taller than she really was to get the perfect shot.

Ah yes, the fate of small people

When we finally made it, we noticed yet again, that New Yorkers seem to enjoy queueing "outside" on the streets. For some obscure reason, the theaters and event halls of New York did not take the space for foyers into account.

Waiting for the musical... outside

The musical was fantastic and truly enjoyable. For those of you, who are not familiar with the story of this prize winning musical, I can outline it to you based on my limited comprehension of the words that were sung and the dance choreographies.

So there were these Cats who call themselves "gellical cats". They explained it, but it was not clear, because they all spoke at the same time. Then once every unspecified interval one cat can also become a gellical cat and can start out fresh or become better or go up into the heavens.
Then you have the introduction of every single member of the gang of gellical cats, but it is unclear who wants to win the trophy. There is one cat who is quite battered and beaten who can sing fantastically about her memories of being awesome, but when she fails to be awesome, everyone is sad.
At the end, the fat chief cat gets taken hostage by a renegade random other cat, who then releases him directly after again, but because of this he saw the battered cat sing and that made him decide that the battered cat can become gellical and that meant that she flew to the ceiling. The End.

The unclarity of the story aside, the songs are fantastic and the show was immense. The theatre was surprisingly small, but that gave it a very cozy atmosphere. We had the first row of the balcony, so we had a perfect view of all the action.

The view from the first row of the balcony was awesome!

For some reason, during the break, half the viewers went on the stage and the fat chief cat stayed to answer questions...

At the end of it, we walked once more over Time Square just to see it by night. It is every bit as bright and confusing for the eyes as shown in the news or on TV. Nice experience, but a bit too much for me.

We finished the night off with our first ever ride with an Uber taxi. We just never did it before, but that night seemed a good time to do so. I think every American does it nowadays, because you can save yourself quite a lot of money that way.

The ride itself was uneventful. Our driver on the other hand was a rather interesting individual. He was orginally from Pakistan, but he joined the US military when he came over in 2002 (yep, remember 9/11), was sent directly to Afghanistan, got shot 3 times and sent home to the US, where he then received his citizenship. I did not dare ask him anymore about his time in Afghanistan. I was not sure if this was a sore spot with the person and I felt it was tactless, so I left it at that.

By that time, we got back to our place and went directly to sleep as we had to have an early start in order to get to the Statue of Liberty on time.

Time Square at night

Picture Time! Time Square, Rockefeller Center, 5th Avenue and Brooklyn Bridge

There is not much to be said about today that cannot be said in images. The weather was stable-ish today, so we decided to check out New York's sights in Manhattan.

Time Square
This meant first arrival at Time Square which is admittedly so busy and shouty with billboards and video boards, it is hard to figure out where to look first. This is the part of the city that never sleeps.





Nintendo Store
I had to admit to myself the level of sadness that my life has reached, when I realized how excited I was to see a Nintendo Store in Time Square. Even better, on the way there we found a bust of Bart Simpson.
The stuff that the store had can only be described as sad, yet wonderful and I would wear it. Check it out for yourself. In addition, the book that was shaped like an old NES cartridge was awesome!







Rockefeller Centre
I always thought that the Rockefeller Centre is actually a shopping mall. To my surprise, it is a block of buildings in the centre of the city dedicated to... not sure what... capitalism, I guess.



New York City Library
On our way to the Empire State Building, we had a quick look into the New York City Library, just to have a look how they tried to manage the split between a quiet environment for study and thousands of tourists each going in there to have a look at the architecture of this very old building... The answer is lots of security checks and prohibition signs...





















Empire State Building
On entering the Empire State Building (ESB), I got reminded of the PC game Bioshock that I am currently playing. Quite obviously the designers of the game used the interior of the ESB as inspiration... so it felt strangely familiar. The only real difference was that no genetically modified crazy people want to slice me open and eat my brain while laughing maniacally... so, only a minor detail is different there.
Today's mission of the people running the ESB is to convince people to make their buildings more energy efficient. They did this buy calculating the energy and money savings from some investments.

Afterwards, we went all the way up to the 86th floor, followed by a careful navigation through 1 million different souvenir shops.

The Financial district as seen from the ESB

The Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island really is quite small

Brooklyn Bridge
After the ESB, we went for some dinner, before our last tick in the box, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge at night. This is a bit of a rite of passage. The pictures did not come out as well as I hoped, but it was very cool to see Manhattan by night. Check it out below.

Again, Lady Liberty from far away

9/11 Memorial Museum, Central Park and Beer Brewing in Harlem

First off, New York is big! It is one huge city that cannot expand anymore, so that rents have become so expensive, that formerly "dodgy" neighbourhoods have been declared "hip" and all sorts of folk live there now. Strange place, but rent is a big thing here. On the metro every second poster is about teaching tenants how to "freeze" their rent, i.e. keep it at the current price for at least a year.

With the weather being sunny and nice, we decided to go back to where we started off yesterday and get all depressed by entering the 9/11 Memorial Museum. On a serious note, however, this museum is a tear-jerker and a half. It depicts the events of this horrible incident to the minutest detail with graphic pictures to make people aware of what had happened.

An image of the sky line of Manhattan shortly after the two planes hit the Twin Towers

The purpose of this memorial museum is obviously to commemorate those who have lost their lives in the attacks, but they tried to go one step further in this case. Because the attack was so recent (I was 19), the digital age caught most of it on camera. There were interviews of the relatives of victims and of the firemen and policemen who lost their lives trying to save people from the collapsing buildings. In addition, videos of how the second plane crashed right into the second tower and a wall with a picture of most of the almost 3000 victims.

These stairs saved many lives as they remained a stable way out of WTC 1

Only a small portion of the wall that showed pictures of the victims

A fire truck that was salvaged from the wreckage

The final message of the memorial was, however, to be an uplifting one. The architects of the rebuilding of Ground Zero did not want to leave the site as a barren reminder, but they wanted to give a message of hope and renewal. They did this, for example, by having a wall with a quote by the Roman poet Virgil as you can see in the images below. They also left one steel beam of the old building standing with positive messages from survivors and accounts by relatives of loved ones that they lost.

Here you can see the so-called "Last Column", the last steel beam left standing from the old WTC

To be honest, I had mixed feelings when I went out of the memorial, for several reasons. For once, I saw two people a mother and her daughter silently crying next to me while I was going through the footage. Regardless of whether they lost a loved one in the attacks (they were only 16 years ago) or were just overwhelmed by the evidence, is not important. It made all this a little too close for comfort.
Also, I do not think that the architects achieved their goal. I did not feel hopeful at the end of the tour. I felt a little depressed. So much anger and hatred. I know what they tried to do and they talk about all the projects that they did to help and all... Just did not work for me.

To get that downer out of our system, we decided to use the sunshine and walk a little through the famous Central Park, before we made our way to Harlem, where we would be brewing some beer with our host, Celeste.

I am not sure what I expected from Central Park. The film industry made it out to be this green jungle of an oasis hybridised with a fair ground and the ocean... or something like that. In the end, it is "just" a massive park. When I say massive, I mean "massive". I think it is probably bigger than the entire city center of Würzburg and then some. Let's say it like this, we entered somewhere in the middle, walked for about 30 minutes and managed to walk maybe an eights of the length of it.
There are lakes there, lots of people doing sports, horses riding around, you name it, it was there.







I can understand why Central Park is so important for New York. Whichever direction you go, it'll take you a fair bit of time to get anywhere near resembling greenery. I believe to get to upstate New York you have to take a train for 2-3 hours to be out of the city. When the plane was landing, there was only city, as far as the eye could see.

After a leisurely stroll through the park it was time to get ourselves to Harlem, which was yet another 20 minutes by metro northward (from Brooklyn, you need to go northwesterly). A former African American / Carribean neighbourhood, it is now pretty much mixed. Still mostly African American with a strong of hispanic and some Caucasian / Asian sprinkles, it actually felt very residential.

Via AirBnB, we found an offer by Celeste, our host, to brew some beer with her. Celeste started to make Crafts beers out of Harlem 17 years ago first as a hobby, because she likes cooking and after awhile it turned into a veritable trade which keeps her well afloat.

During the next 3 hours, we sat down with her, an Ohioan TC pre-producer, a tennis coach from NY, a Brazilian Marketeer and a British engineer and made the first steps of beer. The idea was simple, she told us how it is done and what ingredients are possible and we would just make choices.

So we crushed some barley so that the starch could be dissolved in water, we added it to boiling water, then we added oats... because we could and then added varying versions of hops. Spice-wise, we knowingly navigated away from the German law of purity and added coriander and cumin to our mix. All the while we had an easy chat.

At the end of it, she would put it in the fermenter and in 4 weeks time or so, she will send us our beer. In her words "I cannot guarantee that it will taste good, but it is beer." I gotta say, this was a really cool experience. So cool in fact, that Isi and I may buy a home brew kit and do that at some point at home with friends, as well :D