So it starts like this.
Mom and Dad dropping me off at the Dum..Dum.
Mom giving me a good emotional speech about staying careful,aware and holding myself in all possible situations.Dad, very quiet,like he's gonna miss his buddy.Sister,the usual chatterbox, and also my biggest die-hard fan who already believes my thesis will win me the nobel prize someday,Lolz,who kept telling me about how I shouldn't worry about anything back home and it's all gonna be ok.
Well,thatz my family,God's most precious gift to me.
I never missed them more than i did in that 22 hrs weird flight. Weird coz i got up in calcutta in a direct flight with a stop at delhi,here comes the weird part, they make u get down at delhi airport(phish market is a better description) and u change planes, itz like a completely new check in minus lugggage.I had heard about delhi's internationtional terminals being unduly overcrowded but howrah bridge won't look all that busy to you, once u spend some time there.
I was just talking to a co-passenger at delhi, Katie, who happened to be a professor of biology at the NYU, when something really funny happened. Some guy, bengali by appearnce,very innocent looking like he won't hurt a fly, came upto me and said hey i just overheard your conversation,am a graduate from UMN too, am from calcutta, i used work here in tata motors, i did my undegrad in IITG, UMN is a great place blahblahblah.........and suddenly he sneezed very heavily like his brains would burst out, before i could talk or react, the woman next to me walked away and u know what ,so did I, and so did the next person, and soon so did all of us, ( they should call it fear flu not swine flu), he was left all alone just because he had a bad sneeze,immdiately I took a napkin and wiped my hands and stopped talking for a while, looking back at it,i feel that was very insensitive of all of us, but thanks to media, common man is a lot more scared these days.
Me getting down at JFK 60'clock Tue 11th August , Ron picking me up at the airport,us finding our way past that stupid airport railcar, and here I am at NYC, Harlem, the place where my buddy stays, the block that i had last seen in Die Hard 3,and am heavily jetlagged. I have to admit that fear makes us take stupid decisions, the easiest way of getting past a jet lag is that,just keep doing everything at regular hours, sleep when itz nite and eat even when you are not hungry and stay normal, but because i had seen too much television before leaving india, i was thinking like this, i should just oversleep, thatz the best way of avoiding any possible infections/flu , looking back at it, i can only smile at myself. HUH.
So I,slept two and half days straight and Ron had an exam to study for.
Other than our short little trips to a some nearby italian and mexican resturants, thhe first 2 days were pretty uneventful.(A vegetarian's perspective)I feel italian food just overflows with cheese and mexican food reminds you of Indian food quite a lot. Funnily, I never noticed this about mexican food when i had it back in india.
So we went along to our first place of visit in NYC, Rockefeller centre.When you are in Manhattan it feels like you are in a very chilled out place, like the humdrum of a busy metropolitan is missing, but once you are downtown you see the real NYC,the skyscrapers lined up for miles, and yeeah not just buildings, architectural marvels, you might have read about those in many books,i will not try to capture the spectacle in my words,go feel it yourself.
So we went on top of the second highest building in NYC now(probably),and enjoyed an aerial view of the entire city, quite a sight that.I had thought, initially that I would probably be the only visitor,(who on earth would wanna go on top of a building paying 15 dollars), but to my surprise,there quite a lot of people there.
Next we reached,Times square, there are so many places in this world which are worth watching over a hundred times over, like Taj Mahal, this one is worth watching just once , but you will be spell-bound the first time you watch it, next time onwards you won't even know u are there.I think thatz what explains the hundreds of visitors and tourists standing there for hours together and admiring the amazing play of lights(like a daybreak). I was no different, but yeeah you wont feel the same the next time you go there,which we did, 2 days later to watch a movie.
Third act,a typical american bar on the times square,few drinks, we call it a day with lots of pictures as a testimony.
Next day, we start late, do some shopping, have some junk food and reach "ground zero", the place where the twin towers stood once, apparently that has now become a construction site for the new set of towers,now coming up,called freedom towers.Looking at that site, i wondered how much world politics has changed since that day, for gud or for bad, only time will tell.I couldn't take a picture, thought it might haunt me(Silly me !).
Next we,reached the site of another architectural wonder, built in 1875 and absolutely flooded by tourists,the brooklyn bridge.The manhattan bridge happpens to be right in front of it.I wonder how Shah Rukh sat singing on this bridge all alone, Kal ho na ho, it should take at least 3-5 hours to completely evacuate the bridge.Nevermind, he's our superman, absoultely capable of anything.So we went around the parks, waterfronts and viewpoints all around the twin bridges.
And thatz when you see another side of this sublime city,the calm one, the coming out for a walk one, the breeze is so amazing one, the gentle one.They say sunrise and sunset at this location is quite scenic and it truly was.We were accompanied by Ron's roommate,Vinay who kept providing me with his tid bits NYC gyaan once in a while, and it was nice to know too.
I always believed that all those websites which rank resturants and theatres on a weekly basis,never reinvent the wheel, their sample surveys provide us with a very tunnel vision about things,but here i was,about to to be contradicted. Ron took us to a place which he said is a great place coz it got voted by Zagat as the best pizza place in NYC,i thought yeeah letz see,but even a fusssy foodie like me was completely floored, I have never had better pizza in my entire life than in that italian pizza joint that day(SLUURp!). I shall follow zagat from now on.
Little down the street was where i saw quite a scene.
A street full of italian resturants(around 3/4th mile long) called "little italy", resturants all over the place, and all those little shops selling junk jewellery and other trivial stuff, with lotz of small flashing lights,all over the place. In short , typical jatra party style rapchik masala, so Indian mela like, the decoration so indian wedding like,and all this is italian, well aryans must have definitely come from europe.
The next day was completely dedicated by us in visiting the Liberty island,statue of liberty and the ellis island.One more incident worth talking about, we are standing in an infinite queue of tourists to get into the water ferry which would take us to the the islands, lots of bums kept asking for money by playing instruments and singing etc. So here we are, and we see a set of bearded gentlemen and a few women in black burqa like clothes talking in hindi,we are guessing Indian/Pakistani, suddenly the bum next to us starts playing,some tune,Ron says(dunno how he knows) dude itz Pakistan's national anthem, and then a little gal from that group goes out and gives some money to him.Hmmm, Purpose solved for him, we were still guessing, he just knew what to do,awesome maan u rock.
The statue of liberty is a worth watch, not just for it's majesty and beauty but also for the amount of history surrounding it.USA the nation built by immigrants, this is first thing the immigrants used to see when they entered the states.The statue of a lady with a torch in one hand and the declaration of independence in another.Then the immigrants were taken to the Ellis island, which was like the immigration centre of US back then, they now have a software which can track back the name of the ancestors of the americans, after they furnish a few details.Hmm, must be emotional.In fact they have a small museum of sorts at the Elllis island commemorating many special days and occassions.Like when 11000 immigrants had entered the US in a single day,like how much diversity used to be on display in the ellis island, my favorite one,the jew man used to kiss his wife like he wants to exhaust all his kisses, the italian just holding his daughter and not displaying any affection towards his wife in public, thatz diversity,thatz US.
We saw a short movie about what was it like to be an immigrant back then, what went through there minds, what happened at the island, how the immigration process was joy for many and going back to bondage for a few.Quite Moving, I would say.
So we called it a day again
Our next destination was the famous walls street on a saturday.All empty, except for the tourists.I must admit hat the statue of George Washingtom near the NY Stock exchange is quite a piece of art and then there was the legendary bull, from where the stock market "Bull" finds it 's name. Legend goes,it was to motivate the traders and provide them with a pinch of aggression as they walk in everyday.Watever.Traders might consider creating a bear, just to keep themselves in check sometimes.
My last day consisted of shopping and movie watching(Hangover,Kaminey) and just chilling in NYC.
Hope to go back once more, I still haven't been to Niagra.
But overall, a trip to remember!
