009 - tue 09/05/2006 - new york

we slept in. i think we needed it. we left the hotel in search of the statue of liberty. we mistakenly headed to battery park city, a very business-like pocket of downtown manhattan thats on the hudson on the west side of the island. it was very quiet, lots of clean open esplanades, empty, people in business suits. we saw a volvo made out of lego, and some yachts.

we walked all the way to the tip of the island to castle clinton where we attempted, and failed, to buy statue of liberty tickets. they need to be bought in advance, so keep that in mind next time you are at castle clinton, lest you dare cop the (non-)wrath of the disinterested unhelpful ticket clerk. since we were in the area, we took the opportunity to walk north into what i guess is truly downtown new york, which they call the financial district. wall street, stock exchange, and all that. there were some amazingly pretty old banks down there and some great curving avenues - a lot of manhattan is straight east-west, north-south roads, which makes for great views of streets lined with tall buildings off onto the horizon. but to see the high-rises lining the road as it curves was pretty great, a really foreign thing to see (for me anyway). we weren't allowed to actually see the floor of the stock exchange because its been closed to the public since 9-11.

which reminds me, we actually walked past ground zero on our erroneous trip through eerie battery park city. we didn't really realise it, because there wasn't a great fanfare. i don't know if i expected dan rather to be there, or for everyone to be walking in slo-mo, but it was just a construction site. presumably there is some kind of memorial but we didn't seek it out.

i decided i wanted to see williamsburg, which i understood to be a pretty cool part of brooklyn, ie hipster central. we thought it would be a good excuse to make a token trip outside of manhattan, so we walked up and down williamsburg's bedford avenue for the afternoon. many cool vintage clothes shops, restaurants, people wearing thick rimmed glasses, boys in tight pants, girls with fringes, that kind of thing. it was cool though we felt like we hadn't quite hit the nerve of the place. our feet were tired.

another train, a few stops later, another district, little italy. almost as many italian flags as american flags, which meant you couldn't see much bar the flags. street vendors selling sketches of al pacino. cafes blaring sinatra out onto the sidewalk. we knew we were guaranteed good coffee in little italy so we found a little cafe and indulged.

it was heading towards dusk. we'd missed the statue of liberty today, but figured we'd head back to the tip of the island to catch the ferry out to staten island ferry. our swiss friend we'd met in los angeles, marko, had suggested heading out on the ferry before dark, and then coming back as the sun was setting to see all the lights come on across the manhattan skyline. sounded damn good. so we did it and it was damn good. between ferry trips, we were forced to find a pub on staten island and drink wine.

because we hadn't seen enough bloody districts, we headed to chinatown for dinner. that area of manhattan seems a little wacky, because chinatown is right next to little italy and has been expanding so steadily over time that there are a few blocks where they kind of overlap, so you see these italian stores and restaurants jutted up against chinese newsagents and whatever. there was a tree in our restaurant, although it wasn't real. we went home with big bellies.

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