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.
