26th December 2016 – Boxing Day – Day 4 in
New York City
Boxing Day in the USA is just another day to print money
for the locals and the Government. Nothing is closed and everything is
open to ridiculously late hours. As tourists, this worked for us.
It was time for us to start using our New York
Passes. These passes are supposed to make your queuing time a heck of a
lot shorter, it covers your entry fee and is supposed to kill your waiting
time. Once these passes are activated, they have to be used consecutively
so we were about to start the heavy duty sightseeing part of our trip.
The next five days turned out to be absolutely exhausting but boy we jammed
some shit in! We started on the Big Red Bus. This bus took us on a
tour of all of the exciting things to see in New York and gave us a rundown of
some famous and historic areas, schools and buildings, one of which was an odd
shaped flat iron building, a family court house where Law and Order SVU film
their show on the steps before and after their fictitious court cases (see, I
remember shit), and other attractions on our way to take a boat out to Ellis
Island to see the Statue of Liberty.
It was bloody hard to get excited when we were facing the
prospect of the three hour queue to get onto the fucking boat and it was as
cold as a witch’s tit. After queuing initially for the tickets that the New York Pass granted us, we had to join another queue that went for
miles to get onto the boat. It was really cold and threatened to rain on
us as we slowly shuffled forward. When we neared the building that would
grant us entry, we discovered the reason for the hold up. There was
airport grade security that we all had to get through, taking off belts,
jewellery, coats, having our handbags scanned…my God, I was waiting for an anal
probe…I was disappointed.
It took an age to finally get through then we finally
made it onto the boat. Miss Marvellous and I went top deck to maximise
the quality of our photos of the Lady herself. The dark and foreboding
sky drizzled on and off and made the hair poking out of the snowman erection
hat frizz madly, despite my efforts with a straightening iron and spotted the
photos with drops of Mother Nature’s nectar (piddle). When we got there,
I assumed we wouldn’t get off the boat, just stay on and go back but the family
was horrified by this ridiculous assumption. “…as if we all queued for
three hours to not get off on the island!” Jesus, calm your tits, I just
thought you’d want to fit some other shit in today, okay? Fuck me!
The island was informative and interesting and I’m glad
we got off to explore. We made a quick trip to the restrooms lest we find
ourselves in New York with a full bladder and no prospects of emptying it, and
Miss Marvellous made a mad dash through the gift shop, grabbing the last snow
globe, which was unboxed, but she didn’t care. We kept this from the boys
because the bastards were starting to judge everything we bought, as men do.
On the return trip on the Big Red Bus, we went past the
pier where the Titanic was supposed to dock…if that ninja iceberg hadn’t leaped
out of the water and sunk the fucker. We met up with some family members;
my aunt, uncle, cousins and their family. We tried to get into Eataly but
it was as posh as all fuck and couldn’t seat 12 of us so off we trundled to
another Italian restaurant a few doors down. I was quietly grateful
because our pockets aren’t as deep as my extended family and I didn’t like the
prospect of being left with nothing but pocket lint after we ate.
27th December 2016 – Day 5 in New York City
We decided to tackle the 911 Memorial Museum. We
had arranged our tickets after we looked into the Twin Tower Pools the night
before, prior to leaving the area, to avoid the queues. Success!
Our New York Pass worked in our favour on this occasion and we went
straight in.
Our journey through this sombre place that holds so much
sadness and loss for so many started with a short film about a woman’s painful
discovery that her fiancé, a fire fighter, had perished in the Tower 2 building
collapse on that awful day. After this, we moved into the museum.
We saw people’s belongings; coats and bags and helmets that were recovered from
the rubble. We saw the twisted columns of the destroyed building, fire engines
that somehow survived while the men and women in their respective units
perished. There was constant footage of those planes hitting the
buildings, filmed by people who happened to be taking footage of the twin
towers when it happened, unaware that the footage they were capturing of a
historical moment that would change the world forever would be viewed
worldwide. It was quiet and respectful and I felt moved by the entire
three hours or so that we spent in there, taking in as much in.
After a morning of sad reflection, we caught the subway
to cheery Brooklyn to try to restore some joy back into ourselves and walked
over Brooklyn Bridge (after we found the bloody thing. We had to follow a
tour group to find it…confounding place, Brooklyn
- bridges everywhere). This was one of
the items on The Captain’s ‘must see’ list and we took a stack of photos.
Miss Marvellous, The Captain and I all bought something from the artists
selling their amazing art on the bridge (it still sits on a shelf to be
framed...one day). Tourists wandered around like browns cows all over the
bridge, ignoring the signs stating the bike lane is for bikes and the walking
lane for walkers and one local had us laughing when he started ringing his
bicycle bell loudly like he was on a bloody ship “ding, ding!” and yelling “get
out of the way!”, ploughing through the throngs of stupid tourists. I
guess having that many knobs in your city over the Christmas period every year
would make anyone lose their shit!
After the bridge, we went back into New York and saw that the queue for the Empire State Building wasn’t so long. We joined the queue and were inside
the building quite quickly. What a fucking trick that was! We had
to queue for the tickets and then queue for another three hours to get through the
security and up to the deck. Boy Wonder was not the epitome
of patience on this occasion and groaned constantly. At some point, Miss
Marvellous had to turn away lest she belt him across the head because let’s
face it, none of us wanted to be in this fucking queue. When we finally
got to the elevator, and took it up to the area where we could view the city
and it was almost sunset. As much as we bitched about the queues, this
view was astounding. We then had to queue again for the elevator to take
us up to the observation deck outside so we could photograph without the
reflection of glass. More groaning from Boy Wonder and Miss Marvellous
looked like she was going to punch him in the throat at any moment.
Suddenly, one of the people posted near the elevator said loudly “if you don’t
want to wait in the queue for the elevator, you can walk up the six flights of
stairs and get there quickly.” I looked at the kids and said “Hell yes!”
fist punched the air, stuck my elbows out and made it to the door of the
stairwell first. At this point, I completely forgot that I am as old,
that I have asthma and have the fitness level of fat bear in hibernation.
Suddenly I was twenty three and a gym junkie…not. What a fuckwit.
Off I went, belting up those stairs, taking them two at a
time. By the fourth floor, I started to slow a little, my limbs starting
to shake and Miss Marvellous was protesting breathlessly behind me, “Why are we
running?” I found some air to suck in and yelled back to her “because we
need to get up there before all the people behind you over take us!” She
looked behind her; there was nobody there because they were taking the stairs
at a sensible pace unlike her stupid fucktard of a mother. By the fifth
floor, my lungs felt constricted and the airflow wasn’t as clear as it was
before I became completely spastic and started this ridiculous behaviour.
By the time I reached the top observation deck, I was stumbling about, barely
able to stand on my jelly legs and actually fell bodily through the door.
The cold air hit me and I chose to ignore the growing wheeze, yanked out my
phone and started to take photos of the magnificent view. An annoying
gaggle of Russians with their sable hats and their fur coats with their
entitled arrogance hogged the view forever, taking millions of photos of the
same fucking view and not allowing me to get in there before I died from old
age. They took so long that their teenage son started growling at his
mother in his guttural thick tongued accent.
My bronchial tubes had swollen so much by this stage that
every breath in and out was a high pitched squeal. If I was on ground
level, dogs would be going mad. Breathing was becoming quite difficult
and as Boy Wonder sidled up, I had to limit my words because I couldn’t draw
enough air into my lungs to breath, let alone speak, so I just pointed to the
sable hatted bitch in front of me and uttered “these rude Russian
arse-hats.” He wandered off again, oddly not venturing near the view,
while I found myself in a bit of a quandary.
I finally admitted to myself that I was actually having
an asthma attack and death was a possibility up here on the top of the Empire State fucking Building. Trying to avoid drawing attention
to myself, let me die with dignity please, I crouched beside a bin and started
to rifle through my bag, trying to find my Ventolin inhaler. I just about
emptied everything out of the bag onto the concrete in my panic, only to
discover my puffer wasn’t even in there. People were tripping over me and
uttering “what the fuck” when they saw me crouched down there but I was
panicking, trying to get air into my lungs and the air trying to get in through
the swollen bronchial tubes was squealing like a stuck pig. I was all
hunched up and heaving, like a dog fucking a squeaky toy in a corner...somebody
put an apple in my mouth and spit roast me now!
Boy Wonder discovered me and started to panic. He
ran to a man at the door and says, “Please help me, my mother…” I leapt
up like I wasn’t suffocating and dying and said “I’m fine!” only the words
wheezed out of me like a concertina organ let loose in the dining hall of a
retirement village. I could see the whites of my son’s eyes and he looked
like he was about to lose his shit so I hugged him fiercely and forced myself
to calm down; reassuring the poor kid. We went inside and I found a place
to calmly sit and finally, some air got in and I started to breathe
again. My fucking asthma ruined the experience for me. Boy Wonder
and I made a pact to not tell them until we got back down to ground level
because we actually give a shit.
On the way back to the apartment, as exhausted as we all
were this night, me with a throbbing headache because of the asthma incident,
we took the wrong fucking train line and ended up about 10 blocks away from our
brownstone. We had a choice of catching a train back to 42nd street and starting again on the correct line, or
catching a bus to 142nd street.
Our collective groans sounded like a herd of cattle stranded in the middle of
Harlem so The Captain hailed a cab before we stabbed him to death in the hood!
We dined on a big arsed pizza from a Pizza shop across
the road from the apartment. The take away box was massive and had the
Captain laughing, like it was all a joke. Each slice of pizza took up
most of the dinner plate. I found my asthma pump on the floor beside the
bed where my bag had been that morning. From this point forward, I checked
my bag compulsively for my asthma pump before we left the apartment because I
can’t have a repeat of that kind of stupid behaviour!
28th December 2016 – Day 6 in New
York City
We took the subway to Museum of American history.
As we approached, we saw a queue winding around block and considering we were
up and raring to go early, we all groaned in anticipation of the hours of
waiting ahead of us. The Captain stalked up to one of the security guys
and boldly asked, “Do we have to join this ridiculous queue?”
Surprisingly, The guard advised that there was a revolving door around the
corner that we shouldn’t have to queue for very long at, so we made our way
over there hurriedly; walking briskly like we were all in need of a quick shit
because we didn’t want to alert the queued people of our sneaky queue
jump. Security was swift for once; the security guard barely checked my
bag before we got in. We were sceptical that there was no giant queue in
here but this back entry actually worked for us.
There were four floors here. We took our time
wandering from floor to floor, taking in the native animals, marine life, the
history of the native people and the evolution of man, the dinosaurs and lastly
outer space and the planetarium. We had spent four hours in there and the
boys cracked the shits because they’d seen enough and couldn’t understand why
we annoying women insisted on reading the boring plaques and checking
everything out. For fuck’s sake, we were at an interesting museum, we
wanted to check that shit out. We ended up throwing up our hands in anger
and saying “fiiiiiiiinne!” like it actually was fine, but it really
wasn’t. We wanted to go into the planetarium and see the amazing stellar
display but the groan from the boys was loud and unyielding. Poor Miss
Marvellous missed out on her most coveted thing there and we did have a little
bit of a row with them outside of the Museum and the boys were treated with
disdain for a few hours, to show how miffed we really were…and also so we
didn’t hit them both over the head with something very hard.
On the way back to Harlem, I lost a lamb skin glove at
the Subway entrance on 49th street but
I wasn’t allowed to run back up and retrieve it because our train was arriving
at the platform and everyone was feeling a bit tetchy. It’s not like
another train wouldn’t come past in a few minutes but I was loathe to miss the
train and try to catch another on my own (because I’m a wuss and scared of
being lost in New York on my lonesome…especially after the wrong train line
incident the night before).
That night, after we all calmed the fuck down and stopped
wanting to throttle each other, we went on the Harlem neighbourhood tour on
foot and look at all of the different landmarks surrounding us, including
parks, the Harlem River, Yankee Stadium, churches, the City College and
Hamilton Grange, the home of one of the founding fathers of New York, Alexander
Hamilton, a historical figure who lived locally. We ate dinner at The
Grange again but this experience proved to be a shitty-food one that left our
palates wanting and Miss Marvellous’ meal wiped from the bill due to the lack
of pork and huge content of pig belly fat in her dish.
Shit Happens in USA…New York Part 3 will continue our New
York experience as soon as I've written it.
