Chicago, IL (continued)

Chicago is really growing on me, so I've decided to slow down the pace a bit and hang back here for a while. I've got the whole of June to do the west coast, after all.

I'm not sure if I'll revisit the Greyhound experience but I'll definitely use Amtrak again. The seats are nice and roomy and you can get something approaching a decent night's sleep. Incidentally, on my train here, there were two or three Amish girls sitting behind me, both of whom I found peculiarly sexy in a way which I probably need to repress right now.

This being America, things are going very well in the food department. I did have good intentions about having a varied and economical diet by cooking in the hostel kitchen, but unfortunately such lofty aims are difficult to maintain when Subway are doing footlongs for $5. Mmmmmm, footlongs.

Yesterday I hired a bike and cycled up and down the 'lakeside path', which is 18 miles or so of very nice Lake Michigan beachfront. It's a freshwater lake and as such the water has a distinct swimming-pool colour to it, which is nice but rather weird. The weather here is nice but somewhat temperamental - I got mildly sunburned and utterly drenched in one day yesterday. I then rounded the day off by going along on a group trip to the Lincoln Square German festival, which featured folk music and bratwurst and other authentically German things like that but which was of course just an excuse to get arseholed on imported German lager in big pint-and-a-half jugs. Slightly rough this morning, but only slightly. After spending my first week and a half in the USA just whizzing around travelling and seeing stuff, it was nice to relax a bit and get talking to people properly. My fellow pissheads last night were several Americans, an Aussie, a Brazilian and a lass who lives in Fenham (she's from Stockport originally so she's not a Geordie, otherwise I obviously wouldn't have spoken to her at all.)

Today I'm going to just relax and go down to the beach and read a book. Tomorrow I'm off to Lincoln Park, where I hope to avoid naff overrated nu-metal boybands and instead betake myselfto the zoo.

Apologies to anyone who has emailed me and not seen a reply. I'm already spending way too much money on Internet terminals and I need most of that time just to sort out my various travel and accommodation stuff.

Chicago

Navy Pier, Chicago

Chicago, IL

I've never seen the film or musical 'Chicago', unfortunately, but if anyone is a big fan and wants me to watch out for anything in particular then let me know.

I think the difference between the Americans and us is that they still believe in all their own myths - that just the name of a city in their own country can conjure up feelings of glamour and romance, hence the musical being entitled simply 'Chicago'. For us Brits it would at least have to be a foreign city, like 'Paris' or 'Vienna' or whatever. You can't imagine Andrew Llloyd Webber writing a musical called 'Sheffield'.

Anyway, I'm newly arrived in Chicago today and I have to say it's probably my fave US city so far if only because of the climate - it's sunny, but it's very fresh and only about a quarter as humid as NYC or DC. Plus it's on a more manageable scale and is generally nicer. So much so that I felt in a good mood as I wandered round even though I had just ended a 17 (seventeen) hour Amtrak journey from DC. Amtrak is to British trains what Stella is to Ace. Recommended. The total distance of the trip was about 760 miles, which, to put things into perspective, is roughly equivalent to the distance between London and Milan. And I'm not even a third of the way across this country yet.

I got off my train and dumped my bag at the hostel, but I had quite a few hours to kill before I could check in properly and have a shower. So I had to find something to do. Settled for going up the Sears Tower and checking out the view from the Skydeck (103rd floor) - it's the tallest building in America. The view isn't quite in the same league as that from various parts of NYC but in some ways it's a much more pleasant city to look at.

Just a short one today. Once I've had a chance to check out Chicago properly I'll update again.

Washington DC (continued)

I'm really getting the hang of America now. I'm leaving tips in the right places and everything. However I'm having to restrain my (admittedly modest) North East accent, especially certain vowel sounds, in order to avoid any repeat of conversations such as this:

'Where can I pay?'
'Restrooms are over there, Sir.'

I've now had two full days in which to savour the delights of DC, after getting here on Saturday afternoon. First port of call yesterday morning was the Holocaust Museum. It's all done well and tasteful enough but really I think it's just meant as a basic 20th century history lesson for anyone who might need it. After that I strolled over to the Washington Monument, which as anyone who's seen it will testify, is waaaay bigger than you think it's going to be. You see it from a distance and it doesn't look all that much, but then you walk towards it for ten minutes and realise you don't seem to have got any closer. It's 555 and a bit feet tall. From the Monument I walked down to the Capitol, via the WW2 monument. It was a baking hot day and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I got sunburnt but not painfully so. The whole 2 miles of the grassy stretch from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol is superbly clean and well-maintained, although the sense of tranquility was somewhat offset by the 'Rolling Thunder' bikers' parade rolling through town - hundreds and hundreds of Harleys, one after the other, drowning out even the sound of the airliners trundling overhead.

I also went to see the Vietnam memorial. It's surprisingly modest and tasteful - at no point is it too tall to reach the top of. They have laminated catalogues listing all the 50,000 names; out of curiosity I looked up how many men with the surname 'Major' died in Vietnam. There were six.

The various Smithsonian museums were pretty good, especially the Air & Space one, where I gazed at a paper and wood thing for quite some time before finally twigging that it was actually the original Wright Brothers machine and not a replica. Similarly they also had the original Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. My days as a teenage plane geek are not entirely behind me you know.

Today I went to see the White House. It was an anti-climax, much smaller and closer to the street than I was expecting. Thence to the Arlington Cemetery, which was enormous and pristine and quite thought-provoking. In some places the graves stretch as far as the eye can see, although it's set in hilly ground so you can't see them all in one go. Many of the headstones were accompanied by those of a wife - or, in some cases, wives (not concurrent I presume). I had been walking round a remote corner of the cemetery by myself for quite some time when suddenly I turned a corner and the gravestones were much newer - they had people around them, elderly couples holding hands, and young children sitting aside holding flowers and with reddened eyes. I kept a respectful distance.

Overall Washington is basically a bit of a dump, but it has more than enough buildings and monuments to hold the attention. It's also one of the few Western cities to have a cohesive architectural theme (neo-classical), which is preferable in some ways to mish-mash cities like London.

Can I just say, very quickly....Dirty Leeds Staying Down ha ha ha f****ing get in!!! Thank you.


Washington Monument, from the edge of its shadow

 

Washington Monument, again



Washington DC

Yesterday I had another full day of New York-ing...Grand Central Station, Ground Zero,the Staten Island Ferry, Times Square and then - last thing before going to bed - a late-night stroll back over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.

I didn't stay long at Ground Zero because they're already well on with building the new stupidly big thing, whatever it is they're building, so there wasn't really anything to see. To be honest it just felt a bit ghoulish to be hanging around there and contemplating what happened.

This morning I had my inaugural experience with Greyhound buses. Got off to a bad start with a gi-normous queue at Port Authority Bus Terminal, but it left on time in the end. Unfortunately I was last on and had to sit right at the back, in amongst a group of people who I can only describe as 'the Wu-Tang Clan's big brothers'. I kept quiet and cunningly blended in by reading Charles Dickens.* The biggest bad-ass dude of them all sat down in front of me and found himself next to a guy who looked a bit Arabic.

'What's ya name, dawg?'
'Ahmed' (or something like that).
'Man, you don't got a bomb or nothin', do ya?'
The Arabic guy looked confused and all the other bad-ass dudes were in stitches.
'Ah'm jus' f***in' witcha...' said Mr Wind Up Merchant.

I felt sorry for the Arabic guy but fortunately it all ended there.(And fortunately no, he didn't have a bomb.)

By the way, in case anybody's concerned that I'm a bit vulnerable out here - I have no doubt that some of you are picturing me wandering around Central Park alone at midnight, staggering under a 4-foot tall backpack and peering at a map and asking gang members if they can change a $500 bill - don't worry. I've been leaving the bag in rooms/lockers, and checking my directions before I set off. Also I have grown stubble and taken to scowling at people as they pass.

Anyway! My Greyhound ride was four hours, and now I'm here in DC. The bus station was in a very dodgy part of town, but my hostel is in a much nicer area. It's 3.50pm EST and I'm not planning to do much for the rest of today as I need to let my NYC blisters heal before I begin my assault on DC properly. Bye for now...

*actually true

New York City (continued)

I've only been here a couple of days and I'm starting to get a little bit of a suntan. Disconcertingly, I'm not going brown or even red, I'm going orange. I hope that this trend will soon be reversed.

First thing I did today (after stuffing my face in a diner, I had a big pile of eggs & potatos & cheese & ketchup & bacon & stuff, I think the dish had a name but I've forgotten it) was get checked out of my cheap hotel and checked into my even cheaper hostel. It's on 103rd Street, just west of Central Park,quite a long way uptown but not quite in the Bronx. Pretty close though!

I'm getting the hang of the traffic laws in NYC. If you cross the street when the red man appears then you die instantly. If you cross the street when the red man is flashing than you die not instantly but fairly quickly. If you cross the street when the white man appears then you have a reasonable chance of survival but you're at the mercy of traffic turning into your street. They may or may not give way to you, presumably based on a quick visual assessment of a) whether you look like you're armed and b) whether you look like you can afford a VERY good lawyer. So far I have managed OK by only ever crossing the street when there are at least a dozen others doing the same around me, because on average that dozen people contains at least four people of each category. And I'm already a big fan of the subway. I use it for all the uptown & downtown stuff. But rather than make things complicated I do the left and right stuff on foot.

Walked through Central Park from my hostel and had a stroll down Museum Mile. The Jewish Musuem was $12 and was a bit disappointing. I was the only person there who wasn't old and rich (and Jewish) so I stuck out a bit. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art was a bit more stimulating, but admittedly I don't know all that much about art. Music and books yes, but art no. And there was nobody around to impress by being pretentious. So I binned the museums and went into Central Park Zoo to look at polar bears instead.

Up to the Rockefeller Center observation deck, then back down and to the Empire State Building to get the King Kong perspective on things. These two views are, by a very long way, the most spectacular man-made sights I've ever seen. I didn't bother taking any photos, you can look them up on the internet easily enough.

The Empire State Building took ages - every time you got to the front of a queue, you turned a corner and there was another blinking queue. I paid extra and went right the way up to the 102nd floor. By the time I got back down (fortunately they have lifts) I was knackered and decided to call it a day. Went into a gloriously American diner - bright colours everywhere and 'Dangerzone' from the Top Gun soundtrack playing, evidently without irony, on the jukebox - and had another huge meal which was essentially identical to my breakfast but with a different name. Washed it all down with a pint of draught Sam Adams beer, which was, frankly, piss.

Back to my hostel for a very badly-needed shower, and basically I fell asleep almost straight away.

New York City

In a Burger King. On Broadway.

New York is just like everyone says it is...'nuff said. The bit I especially like is the steam coming up out of the pavements.The buildings are a bit much for me though - I get dizzy just from looking up at that 12-storey chav-pen next to the Bridges, so round here I'm having to keep eyes firmly front.

Incidentally, credit must go to my transatlantic co-passengers Shelli and Desiree (from Pennsylvania) for their valuable USA-related advice and insight. Thanks ladies. My flights went OK, and US customs (contrary to expectations) were very polite and didn't ask me any difficult questions. I got to my hotel for 7pm EST and was relieved to find it was cockroach-free. Not that $150 gets you your own bathroom. Anyway I showered and then went out for a walk, down Park Avenue and then down Broadway, which is how I've ended up in this particular BK.

When I've finished typing this I'm going back to my hotel, stopping off on the way somewhere for a burger or pizza or whatever from somewhere suitably bohemian. (I wouldn't eat in a BK in Sunderland so I'm certainly not going to do it here.) My hotel room is fairly small but it's nice enough. It's on the sixth floor. The window overlooks the roof of a bar next door, and behind that is a another couple of hotels; and behind that is the Empire State Building.

Next update in a couple of days...

Goodnight y'all!





The Empire State Building, on one randomly-chosen camera setting

 



A different randomly-chosen camera setting