Onward!!

It’ll be an interesting month, that’s for sure. For various reasons after paying rent and assorted bills, I am going to do September on the tightest possible shoestring. I guess it’s time to cash in the dinner favors, drinks offers and lunch dates.

Of course, if anyone is partial to giving away money or needs something done in return for such currency, I am listening.

Sat in the usual lunch haunt, my attention turned away from the issue of Private Eye was reading to a conversation between a lift technician and another man with his back to me at the next table. The technician was explaining about a “fascinating” series of documentaries he’d been watching on TV with his family. The series? The Normans, a ponderously-paced, methodically structured and dry-as-kindling yet somehow captivating show about the influence of the Normans throughout history. Narrated by the classical academic figure, Professor Robert Bartlett, it is very much an old-world documentary, with a lot of pieces to camera and narration over illustrated manuscripts from a thousand years ago.

It was really cool to see the lift technician paraphrasing, accurately, the content of a few episodes. “Before the Normans came here [England], we were mostly, you know, Angles. They brought with them law, and literature, and things we’d lost when the Romans left. A lot of that survives to now, you know. Like words. Did you know that ‘country’ is a French word? Because if you were English, you’d call it ‘land’. That’s the old English word for it. And garage. That’s French too. But I say it /ga’ridz/. Not garahge, because I’m not French,” he ended with a wink.

With a few more forkfuls of chips and beans he continued, paraphrasing from Wednesday’s episode.

“And the fascinating thing about the Normans is that once they conquered, which is what they did all over Europe, they merged with the population. You couldn’t tell after a few years who was Norman and who wasn’t. And nobody else did that at that time.”

He moved on to another show that started last night, called Digging for Britain.

“It really makes you see how much history there is, and we don’t even think about it. What they do in that show is go around to all the digs going on around the UK and talk about the stuff they find. And it’s really well done. Like last night they were at this construction site for a six-lane dual carriageway somewhere down near Dover I think [actually slightly further North, but still in Kent] and what they would do is get the top layer of the soil out and allow the archaeologists to work for like a month. And they would map everything they found before it got covered by the road. And they talked to the guy who found all those coins in Somerset, remember?”

“The BBC really is doing a good job this year. What’s neat is they repeat the programmes in the night, with the little man in the corner, you know, signing away for those people who can’t hear. And it doesn’t hurt that the archaeologist in that other show, you know what you think of when you think archaeology, boring, but she’s not… she’s like this red-headed, kind of blonde woman, in her thirties. And I mean, she’s nice to look at” he guffawed.

I agree. Fully. One hundred percent. The BBC is doing a very good job in this case.

Why the hell did I let myself get talked into going to a music festival again? Not just a music festival, but a metal music festival. In the middle of the English countryside. For the second year running. Last year a guy in our party broke his leg and I spent a night in Burton on Trent accident and emergency with him, talking to a girl who’d taken a bit too many party drugs and was sure her calling was to settle down and have babies.

I bet it’s going to rain my pants off.

See you next week, both of you.

In London, the clouds hang low, as a near-continuous ash-and-white blanket. There is a subdued feeling about the place, and people seem to slide along listlessly. Couples walk along the street in silence. I don’t know if it’s my tiredness and jetlag or what, but it feels strange being here. There is little of the vibrance and exuberance I got so used to in the last fortnight. Both physically and otherwise, compared to the past ten days, it’s cold.

(I’ll try and slot in posts about the details of my trip since the last update when I get the chance and a slightly clearer mind. If you follow my RSS, you should get them as soon as they are posted.)

I figured that getting going early would spare me some of the heat of the day. Wrong. Walking down the street wasn’t unpleasant in itself, but getting to the subway to get to Battery Park was. The subway cars themselves are airconditioned, but that hot air has to go somewhere, namely anywhere in the station itself.

When I say the cars are air conditioned, I mean all but mine on the way down, but that’s a digression. A lot of people would enter the car (which I had found pleasantly empty at my station), look around in dismay upon feeling the heat and escape via the end doors to another carriage. I figured I might as well sit tight, as it wasn’t unbearable, and my excitement at seeing a bit more of New York (alone, this time) sped me onward.

Arriving at Battery Park with around twenty minutes before the museum I wanted to go to opened, I took a stroll past the ferry terminals, past crowds of tourists waiting to get to Ellis Island, past the street vendors selling water for a dollar, and a teenage Finnish girl complaining about something to her mother. I sat in the shade opposite the Skyscraper Museum and realised that I had rounded the tip of perhaps the most famous island in the world in no time at all. Manhattan really isn’t that big across. A child trailing her mother decided to splash around in the little fountain installation, and proceeded to get completely soaked. Must have made him feel more comfortable, and I kind of wish I could have dared to do the same. A cool swimming pool or lake would have been the bomb.

The museum opened at midday, and I went in to buy my ticket from the thoroughly bored-looking girl at the front desk. Barely bothering to talk past her chewing gum, she said “there’s just one floor, starts upstairs to your left”. And her day had only just started.

The museum itself has two distinct halves, the part focusing on Wall Street and its evolution from a street lined by a literal wall to keep the English out of New Amsterdam to the South, and one about the construction of skyscrapers of mind-shattering height and scale. These included a specific exhibit on the Burj Dubai (boring) and on Hong Kong towers (yawn). I was there for New York! The Art Deco gargoyles leering above a three-hundred foot drop, the workers having their lunch on steel beams suspended above nothingness! So, after looking at the historic exhibit, the most interesting bit for me was the part about the World Trade Center site, and how the dug-out land from that formed an entirely new extension to Manhattan in the Hudson River.

I knew I had to be on the Lower East Side after the museum, but since I’d escaped early I decided to walk up and see some of the sites I’d just looked at in schematics, photos and history. Walking down bustling Broadway, with other tourists stopping every few meters to take pictures and gawk at the sights, I found myself at the World Trade Center site before long. Not having seen the Towers standing, I still knew the historical significance of the place. It was certainly accentuated by the continually-laid wreaths on fire station doors, the thousands of people taking peeks through construction walls and taking photographs, and the bronze statue of a Wall Street worker on a bench, talking on his phone with his briefcase on his lap. I suppose such memorials indicate he died on the spot, or something.  But despite the history, it was hard for me to see the place as anything but an immense construction site, laden with historic baggage.

But then the entire city is laden with historic baggage, starting from the Lenape indians being ousted off Manhattan for the value of a couple of thousand beers.

I wandered around streets I knew by name and through vague media memory to find a subway station with a line going to the Lower East Side. The Tenement Museum was built into historic tenement buildings in an area that is rapidly gentrifying with artists, young professionals and the like. I did begin to wonder whether anyone had done anything similar in London, considering the layered history of the inhabitation in that city.

I never saw the museum tour (bookable in advance on the Tenement Museum website) starting and ending with a round-table discussion on immigration, immigrants, social housing and social mobility, but that’s exactly what happened. In the first round we simply introduced ourselves and the Americans gave their ethnic background. Then we took a sort of time travel tour to two restored apartments in the building, one in the 1890s and one in the 1920s. They really were vastly different 30 years apart. The word “tenement” had wholly negative connotations prior to my visit, but it was really cool to see how the families, especially the German Jewish family of the 1890s, made the most of their situation and gave the best they could to their children.

The museum had reconstructed the apartments to be as authentic as possible, going as far as tracing historical lineages of the inhabitants. For the 1920s apartment, they were able to interview a woman who grew up in that very house. Though it was a continent and several decades away from where my father grew up, I really felt like the two places shared a similar vibe. It was a really cool experience that I’d recommend.

The second round of the discussion quickly descended into strange territory, though. A certain Italian-Irish-American gentleman who was there with some of his friends (a couple in their sixties, as was he) started bashing “our socialist president” for allowing “the mexicans and the chinese” to “do what they please” and for the Arab population “in Detroit, effectively imposing Sharia law!” The horseshit flying out of the guy’s mouth was so impressive that the facilitator, our guide, was stunned for a minute, as were we. It took some sharp rebuttal questions and his friends, the couple, to step in, to steer the conversation to more careful territory.

I’d only seen the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park, and didn’t want to pay for the ferry with a thousand other people crammed on like sardines, so after the museum experience we decided instead to take the Staten Island Ferry (which is free) since it goes past the Statue at quite close range. Seeing New York landmarks like Brooklyn Bridge and the morass of skyscrapers from that angle was really cool, especially on the way back with the setting sun. I had also thought we hadn’t been to Staten Island before but on closer examination it turned out we’d driven straight through it on my drive from hell experience on our very first day!

Worn out from the heat, we ended up getting takeout pasta, including my first ever pasta alfredo, and collapsing in the hotel in preparation for an early morning start to Boston the next day.