New York City

Following China we were on our way to South America, but first we had to transfer in New York city. Rather than suffering a four hour layover we had made arrangements for a 170 hour layover, which is to say that we spent a week in NYC

Amanda's family met us there and spent a few days with us before they headed back home.

NYC has so much to see and do, and we saw and did a lot. I had been there once before on work, but I only had a weekend off to explore the city (at least that's what I told my boss!). This time I was able to take it all in. Of course there are the iconic New York images such as the Chrysler building ...

... and the Empire State building

We went up to the viewing deck on the 86^th floor – and wow – that's quite a view...

Some of you who know me might recall that I really enjoy fine art and so I had to drag Amanda to some of the world's best art museums here like the Met, the MoMa, and the Guggenheim. Here we saw works by some of our favorite artists such as Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Modigliani, Jackson Pollock...

... Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, Kandinsky, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Giacometti...

... Matisse, Diego Rivera and his (ex) wife Frida Kahlo, Jasper Johns, Degas, Damien Hurst, Rodin, and of course my favorite of all time Vincent Van Gogh...

Of course the Guggenheim is known not only for the art it contains, but also the building itself is a masterpiece. Designed by Frank Gehry (arguably the world's most renowned architect) it is another hallmark of New York city.

And who could miss mentioning the Statue of Liberty – donated to America by the French after WW II.

The citizens of NYC have a reputation for being, shall we say, a little terse. But we found the locals to be very friendly, actually. Many times if I had a map open trying to figure how to get somewhere a nice person would just come up and offer help. That's not to say New York is only full of smiling happy people. I did feel pretty safe there, but there were signs (literally) suggesting the contrary:

As we blitzed our way through the city, we visited Times Square...

Tiffany and Co. and Saks 5^th Avenue, as well as Christie's auction house – where you can actually buy a VanGough (if you've got about $50,000,000 USD to spare). We walked through Grand Central Station to the Dakota building right beside Central Park. This is where John Lennon lived and where he was shot on December 8,1980.

I asked the door man which apartment John Lennon used to live in and he replied that we was not allowed to say because his widow Yoko Ono still lived there. We quickly saw the cavernous NYC public library, and went to the NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. We walked past ground zero where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down. America is now getting on with building the Freedom Tower in their place.

Nearby is the New York Stock Exchange on Wall street – the very epicenter of the planet's finances. By the time it takes you to read this sentence there will have been about $4,000,000 dollars traded there. And speaking of stocks and finances, I was quite surprised by the conspicuous presence of Canada's TD bank in NYC. They have an office directly beside the NYSE, one in Times Square near the Nasdaq stock exchange, and indeed many branches throughout Manhattan. Who would have thought a Canadian bank would have such a presence in NYC?

We took in some New York culture by seen a play off Broadway. Unfortunately we were badly time zoned and slept through about half of it :-(

We also bought tickets to a Knicks NBA game from a scalper outside Madison Square Gardens...

We went to the Musuem of Natural History, and went through St. Patrick's cathedral...

... and walked several times through Central Park

One curious thing we saw was a “national debt clock”. It ticks off every second, showing each American their share of the national debt...

Wow – now that's a big number. 12,000 BILLION dollars. Ouch.

Nearing the end of our week in NYC we visited the Intrepid – an old WW II aircraft carrier that is now on display. You can walk all through it and see first hand the hardware that America used to project force up until 1990 or so...

Among many other planes on the flight deck was an A-21 blackhawk – predecessor to the SR-71 blackbird.

The SR-71 has the world's fastest PUBLISHED top speed. Of course the performance characteristics of current military planes is top secret, but you can guess they're even faster than than this plane's mach 3. This plane was designed as a spy plane to take photographs over sensitive areas in Russia. It was not a fighter at all. In fact, it had no weapons – nor defense systems. If its radar picked up an incoming missile, the defensive strategy was simple: accelerate. These planes were so fast, and flew so high that they could outrun anything Russia could shoot at them. These planes make a bullet from a rifle seem slow! Imagine firing a rifle at the same moment this plane passed by – this plane would easily pass the bullet. Like not even close – it would be maybe 200% faster than a bullet! Cool!

Anyway, there were many other planes and helicopters on display as well as the ship itself. Beside the carrier was the USS Growler, a retired submarine armed with nuclear capable cruise missiles. There was also a BA Concorde on display. Pretty cool....

And before we knew it our week in NYC was just about over. Unfortunately, there was still one more “adventure” to come. We headed off to the airport with plenty of time to spare, but somehow managed to take the correct subway but in the incorrect direction – we were going AWAY from the airport. For some reason the good folks who manage the NYC subway system decided to save money by NOT putting subway maps in some stations, nor in the subway cars themselves, so we didn't realize our error until we got off the subway at the end of the line. And now there wasn't plenty of time before our flight – in fact it was pretty limited. Too limited to take the subway all the back to where we started from, and then on from there to the airport. So we decided to hail a cab. But out there on 207^th street in Harlem there weren't taxis roving around that you can just jump into. So Amanda went to a store to use their phone and call for a cab and they told her that right across the street was an airport transfer cab company. Wow – just the stroke of luck we needed in the midst of our bad luck. So for the low low price of $70 our driver raced through the rush hour traffic and got us to our airline check in desk just before they closed. He got a nice tip for that bit of driving! I think we'll go back to our old ways of not giving ourselves too much preparation time ahead of flights and trains – we seem to do better that way.

Anyway, we made the flight and are now in South America! Yay!