Empire State Building
First day of New York, New York and boy is it dirty. Everywhere you walk there is literally hundreds of years old stains and gum your walking on. In fact I learnt today that the island of Manhattan has increased in size of over 30% when the original Dutch settlers landed over four hundred years ago – mostly the landfill is from garbage.
Greg, Ben, Wilko, Lauren and myself went out to venture into the city of Manhattan and check out what it has to offer. Nothing too much in mind, just walk about and figure out what this place is all about. Early on in our extremely long walk today we took a brisk walk from 77th west through Central Park. Utterly huge and was a much needed breath of fresh air
We found some nice Australians (yes we seem to bump into them everywhere!) who took our photo for us next to a big fountain somewhere in Central Park. I say somewhere because we weren’t really tracking where we were going just cutting though and exploring the park as we went. Central Park is quite clean and opened to all walks of life. Having this huge chunk of trees and grass is in my opinion necessary for the people of Manhattan to have a sane life style in this world of concrete and steel.
Speaking of steel, our goal today was to check out The Empire State Building which we found out was quite tall. About 1400 feet including the radio tower at the top – which originally was designed to service zeppelin like aircraft but later discovered that it is too windy. The reason I know this is because I paid another $5 on top of my $10 ticket for a portable MP3 player which had the voice of Tony (supposedly a NYNY cab driver) that gave all kinds of crazy facts about the tower. Like it was built in 14 months (!) and that there were only five deaths in the construction of the skyscraper. I found all of this very interesting and a great way to divert my attention from the fact we were so far high in the air.
Though being high in the air has its advantages of overseeing how big really NYNY is. Tony told me quite a few different things about NYNY and the five burrows (an apt name for suburbs or mini-cities) and the past. Coming from Australia which comparatively make for quite a ‘wow’ factor.
I can understand why people say that NYNY is a tough place to live, it defiantly isn’t a friendly place to be in. Whilst the people are quite mellow and pleasant, there is a bit of a communication barrier between the immigrants and us; it makes for difficult conversation and ordering. I’ll try and just forget about the smells; it’s either rotten, wet, or car fumes.
Imagining how people raise families here is simply mind-boggling but I saw lots of kids and strollers of clearly locals at markets. No, no, not supermarkets as there is no where near enough room – old-skool markets that have quite a lot of gear packed in seemingly army like stacking.
NYNY has been interesting and something completely different then anything I’ve ever seen before in my ’sheltered’ life living in Australia. I always thought Sydney was bad but it’s density is nothing compared to Manhattan! I must admit I’m a little intimidated about it all and I’m not sure who I can trust here. Seeing NYPD cars being beaten up and in poor condition doesn’t really ensure confidence either about the safety here but I’m sure that it’s safe enough. After all, it supposedly is one of the most visited cities in the world!
So far I haven’t really figured out why though.
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