9/9/22 Training and Walking to NYC

 At long last I am back in NYC! Pizza places every block, lots of bars and delis and people of every description all over. 

I managed to haul all this onto the train and up into the overhead racks, making sure it wasn’t overhead my seat.

Business Class in Amtrak. It mostly meant more legroom.

They don’t put a very high worth on males around here. Probably for good reason if they are trying to get a duck for the County Council President.

An Amtrak chicken and coleslaw sandwich, which to my horror the cafe carriage server put into the microwave. Surprisingly it was quite good, even more surprisingly it didn’t give me the screaming shits.

My first view of New York - sunshine without furnace heat was a nice change.

The hotel was 10 blocks away but it was easier to roll my luggage there than load and unload it into a cab. I’d almost forgotten how New Yorkish New Yorkers can be and wouldn’t move out of the way as I trundled towards them. Looming luggage and a fed up tourist is a fairly unstoppable concept and they all eventually made way.

The view from the Hotel. Certainly beats the Petone motel.

Is he? I thought that would have made the news. He looks a bit old and not very… Jesus-y.

Apparently he died in 1994 so that seems to be a bit “not the messiah”. Those zany Hasidic's

Good thing I didn’t wait for door sales!

I felt quite young amongst the others in the queue

It’s Mike from Breaking Bad!

Such a professional, not even looking at the auto queue

While the crowd stood and sat at various times, this guy stayed standing the whole time. Not the most popular choice among those behind him.

The show was really good, he did a good mix of the most popular songs and some lesser known (to me at least) ones

An early morning wake up courtesy of someone who had a shower with the door open, with the steam setting off the fire alarm. None of the staff seemed to have thought to let the fire department know as they showed up pretty quickly.

Breakfast was in a diner just across from the hotel, and was a good mix of tastiness. Not a big fan of French toast but the rest was pretty damn good.

The not so fine print holds some clues about the “psychics” methods.

I sense you… *tap tap tap* enjoy knitting and collecting rare postcards *tap tap tap* and are casually racist on Twitter.

The tall building and huge screens of Times Square. As packed as ever.

Nope, no idea why. This is just what happens here.

Turns out there were a bunch of them, all plastic inserts and bleached teeth.

Not sure what this places sells

I took out so many dangling things in here - this are some of the more tidy areas. 

I ended up having to convince the guy to sell me something I wanted, because he wasn’t sure what the price was. Now I’m no expert in sales but I don’t think this is how it’s supposed to work. After swearing at his iPad for a bit he finally decided how much it was.

There was a big gathering of unions down 5th Avenue and a parade. These are Teamsters “supporting” their fellow unions by drinking at an Irish pub. From what I understand this pretty much sums them up.

I did laundry in a real New York laundromat. It mostly involved feeding an ungodly number of quarters into machines and then waiting 40 minutes.

Dinner - pizza NY style, as in actually hand made, doesn’t cost a fortune and sold by the slice.

Also really really tasty. Also the clearest Coke I’ve ever seen. I know the NZ accent isn’t the easiest for Americans to understand but how the hell do you confuse Coke with Sprite?

Tomorrow is September 11 here, and I was going to the WTC site but it’s closed to all but the family of those who died so I might head to the waterfront and may go to the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island.