Our time in New York
We started today with visiting the World Trade Centre Memorial.
To get there we opted to catch the subway. This is always quite the experience! I will be honest and say that I have never felt unsafe in the underground although I would definitely not be catching the metro at night by myself. I find it interesting as it’s almost as though we have entered a movie set. The underground stations are exactly as you would see them in the movies and the carriages are filled with people that appear to be from the same. Interestingly the Bear and I both pictured movie scenes as we travelled along. We did this without knowing that the other was thinking something similar. However, the movies/TV programs that our imaginations lead us to were almost polar opposites. I was sitting opposite an elderly Asian man who was reading a magazine full of all of those hieroglyphics that only they can understand. I found myself in the middle of an episode (the pilot if I remember correctly) of “Now and Again” (1999) where an elderly Asian man on a train releases a vial of sarin gas killing everyone in the carriage. The Asian man avoided death by removing a gas mask from a briefcase and putting it on. I found myself looking around the old Asian across from me to see if he had a briefcase OR a gas mask. The Bear however had placed himself in the movie “Borat” where he released chooks on the subway. So…we were both on the same wave length……but light years apart.
We were both snapped back to the present when an African American man stood at one of the doors of our carriage and started ripping a newspaper in tiny pieces and tossing them angrily on the floor. He was quite feverish with his ripping and was clearly taking the world out on this newspaper. He was making one hell of a mess. I surveyed his immediate area to establish as to whether there were any fire arms or explosives within his reach. I couldn’t see any although with the current dress code being “Michelin Man” a person could hide an array of weapons without obvious detection. Fortunately the angry man got off at a station without causing any bloodshed in our carriage. And yes….I do acknowledge that I require counselling for my imagination.
Visiting the World Trade Centre Memorial was confronting. Back when this happened I watched everything unfold as I did the ironing late one night. My children were asleep at the time however I felt the need to go check on them. It was the first time since they were born that I seriously felt that I could not fully protect them from evil and that scared the living shit out of me. I had watched live as the second plane hit and as both the towers came down. As the Bear and I stood in these very spots, we could not comprehend what occurred that day. To stand in a place of such horror and tragedy left me without words. The memorial is done very nicely although given that it is winter, the trees look dead and heavy snow covers any gardens. Both the north and south reflection pools however were free of snow. I can imagine that during the spring time this would be a very serene place which must be comforting for the families of the victims.
The Bear and I were a little confused though at how some people were behaving in there. Laughing and hooning around struck us as being very disrespectful. The Bear likened their behaviour to those visiting an amusement park which I thought was a very appropriate description. I said that it might be “just their way” of remembering the dead – and trying to make it a happy place? I really did not believe this was the case though. I thought it was very, very disrespectful.
R.I.P victims of 9/11 and thoughts go out to your families and friends xxx
We left the memorial and caught the subway back uptown in order to visit Toms Restaurant Australia Toms Restaurant
Most menus in the USA Toms Restaurant
Waitress: What sort of soup would you like?
Me: *Looks at the Bear with a confused look*
The Bear: What sort of soup would you like?
Me: The roast pork?
Waitress: You have soup first.
The Bear: Today it’s an all in one meal.
Me: *Confused* Ok….well you can say what sort of soup you would like because I wouldn’t be able to eat more than one meal.
The Bear: *looks at waitress* Chicken Noodle please.
Waitress: What sort of salad dressing would you like?
Me: *majorly confused* Ermmmmm…….
Waitress: *rattles off a list of salad dressings in a very heavy Greek accent*
Me: Oil and vinegar? (This is the only thing that I understood that she said, and I was wondering why I would need salad dressing).
Waitress: You want the roast pork?
Me: Yes please.
Waitress: Gravy?
Me: Yes please.
Waitress: Mashed potato, jacket potato or French fries?
Me: Mashed please. (My waistline was expanding just listening to this woman)Waitress: What sort of vegetable would you like? *points to the list on the menu*
Me: Ummm….mixed vegetables please?
Needless to say she went through a similar conversation with the Bear. She brought out my “first course” of a small bowl of chicken noodle soup with graham crackers in packets, along with a simple salad. George Costanza would have definitely brought in an “outside cucumber’ (Seinfeld fans will know what I am talking about) with this salad. It had two half pieces on it, as well as three strips of red onion, a couple of cherry tomatoes, and a lot of lettuce that was taken directly from the heart. The oil and vinegar dressing was exactly that – a bottle of very yellow oil and a bottle of very brown vinegar. It was quaint in a very Nana type of way. The Bear did say that the soup was very good and the salad vegetables were very crisp.
The next course came out and my eyes nearly fell out of my head. My large plate was overloaded with thick slices of roast pork and lashings of lumpy mashed potato. I certainly didn’t mind the lumps because again that reminded me of my Nanas cooking. It was hot and it was hearty. I am not sure what the gravy was though. It was sort of a cross between a tomato gravy (minus the tomato if that makes sense) and hot sauce gravy. I don’t know if there is such a thing as hot sauce gravy, but it’s the only description that I can come up with. The waitress also brought out a small bowl of very over-boiled mixed vegetables however again it is something that took me back to my grandmother. These were good memories.
The Bears roast beef sandwich came out with multiple slices of roast beef lying on top of fresh bread, with the same gravy over it. He also had loads of French fries that were spilling from the plate. He chose broccoli as his vegetable of choice and this came out on a separate plate which the Bear described as cold. Not that this mattered because we had no hope in hell of eating everything anyway! He did eat the cold broccoli though.
We attempted to eat this humungous feed whilst looking around the walls of autographed photos of the Seinfeld cast and celebrities such as Morgan Freeman who have visited.
I was unfortunate enough to witness the oddest of sights however. A man that was sitting in a booth adjacent to us, got out of his chair in order to speak to someone and to go to the bathroom. Despite freezing conditions, we wore blue short, stretchy stubby type shorts, a long orange t-shirt and a grey cardigan. He stood up and displayed the wedgie from hell….and by this I mean that his t-shirt was clenched tightly in his cheeks as well! I was hoping that the man would move away so that I did not have his derrière pointing at me with absolutely no room for imagination, but no, he stopped and chatted to some people. Just when I thought the view could not get any worse, the man tucked his fingers into the back of his shorts in order to try and remove the wedgie. I might point out that this was unsuccessful, and he became more forceful with himself when trying to increase his effort. I attempted to focus on the Bear across the table in an effort not to continue witnessing the “wedgie dig” beside him, however I could not raise my voice loud enough above the chatter in the restaurant (without embarrassing wedgie-dude anyway) to let him know why I was sporting a screwed up face. Fortunately he ended up visiting the men's room and corrected this fashion faux pas.
We left Toms Restaurants New York New York
I know that this screams in the face of everything I wrote during the first trip, however my experience with cab drivers on this trip (with the exception of the toss-wank, dick-face, hen-like, ass-wipe, douche bag, tea-towel wearing clown who after stopping for us on the water front in the cold the other day, drove away telling us to walk the short distance. My mother would be disgusted to learn what language I called out to him whilst flipping him the bird and standing in the middle of the street in New York
The young store attendant looked a little blankly before advising that they do not have any merchandise. The show was too new apparently. I told him that was not correct as the website displayed a stack of items including their prices. The attendant advised that they had nothing to do with the website so were not responsible for what was advertised.
I swear I was a single heartbeat away from an aneurism. The brain explosion was so pronounced I thought my brains would literally fall out or my nostrils. I told them that this could not be! The Bear told the attendant that we would have a VERY disappointed daughter. I said bugger the daughter…..there was an extremely disappointed me!!! We walked through the rest of the store pretty much double checking that the attendant was right, and looking for anything else that would have our trip there to be not a complete waste. The best we could do was nearly walking about with a couple of “Law and Order” mugs, but did not want to risk them being broken on the way home. We also managed to ask another staff member about Blacklist merchandise and were told the same thing. We left empty handed. F**k. Just f**k.
I was not game to pay for any more transport today so we walked back to the hotel. It was only about 10 blocks or so and allowed us to get some supplies on the way back. It had been such a long day we decided against going back out for dinner and just put some wraps and Panini's to eat in. Given that our maximum today was minus 4, this didn’t seem such a bad option. As it turned out, I was more tired than I expected and was unable to keep my eyes open.
Tomorrow is expected to be cold with more snow so we will play it by ear what we do! It is our last full day in 