nawl

The City

Technically I stayed in New Jersey, but there's not a heck of a lot there. Mostly wandered around New York City. So, pictures.

First, the city has a lot of buildings in it.

Ground zero is, well, one of the biggest tourist draws at the moment. Maybe it's tasteless, but I guess that's the way things are. I'd never been to the city before, so I don't have anything to compare to, but the space did feel empty. Also, the streets around were lined with people selling twin towers memorabilia. I wondered how long after the disaster they'd waited to set up shop.

Christophe mentioned that before the towers fell they were *the* thing to see in New York for people outside the US. I'd never really considered them much before - they weren't a very big part of the west coast image of New York that I'd gathered. I hadn't realized that they would be a more important symbol to people across the world than to people merely across the country.

Also in lower Manhattan is Wall St. It was a weekend, so empty. And dark. All those tall buildings just cut out all the light. The sign was also kind of fitting.

There was a statue of a bull in the street. I think it belonged to some big financial company. I liked this angle:

Continuing on in that direction, you get to the touristy area where all the ferries go off to visit Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It was a bit late for that, so I just took a picture of the water. You can see the statue. There were a lot of tourists standing around and taking pictures of each other.

Later we went to Times Square, which is about as bright and garish as I'd expected. The Toys R Us store was pretty darn cool, though. In the center divider of the street, there were literally hundreds of tourists waiting to buy last-minute tickets for Broadway shows. Waiting around in that cold shows some real dedication.

Around sunset on my second day, we finally made it to Central Park. Everything was frozen over, but the sunset was nice.

We also went to the top of the Empire State Building and took pictures of the buildings below. Lots of waiting in line with other tourists.

One mystery remains: how can such a rich city have such horrible roads?

The Weather

It was cold. So cold that one morning my hair froze between the apartment and the car while I was braiding it, and even my upper lip chapped, and I was still a bit chilly in about 5 layers. Brr. I'm reconsidering ever living on the east coast now. (Besides other cultural defects the region may have.)

Back in France

The whole weekend was in French. I had a moment of doubt after Christophe greeted me at the airport with a torrent of high-speed French and it was all I could do to stumble through a few awkward americanized syllables in response, but within hours, I was back up to speed. It felt good.

And plus, it's really fun to be a foreign tourist. Gabriel pulled that one on me when we were visiting Paris together -- one day he just decided that we were going to speak English, because he thought it'd be fun to pretend to be a silly British or American tourist. I protested because I've been an American tourist enough in France (and everyone at least understands some English anyways), but he was happier. But in New York, even though everything was in my own language, it was fun to kind of float around in a little French (or at least franglais) world. Waiters would kind of look bewildered waiting for us to decide things in not-English, people kept asking where "we" were from, and someone on the subway even said "excusez-moi, monsieur".

It was a strange kind of deja vu to be transplanted from the end of summer in the south of France to the middle of winter in New York.