If New York were to be described in a word, I would say, the most appropriate for me at least, would be overwhelming. I used to ridicule Karan Johar and his fixation with the city, but after having been there and experienced the vibe of the place first hand, it’s easy to see why anyone would fall in love with it so easily.
The very evening we reached NYC, we decided to go for a stroll around our Holiday Inn, without having ever taken one look at map, virtual or otherwise, and completely by accident stumbled upon the iconic landmark that is the Times Square. We had no idea which direction we were walking in, for the proper ‘Say Cheese’-type sightseeing we had planned for the next two days, so we realized we had picked a most strategically positioned hotel only when we walked right into the brilliantly lit crossroads.
Times Square is such a visited spot, its attraction is practically built around the advertisements that cover the surrounding buildings from top to bottom. Being probably the most expensive ad space in the world, none of the ads are hoardings; they are all massive LCD screens with the most vibrant of advertisements on everything ranging from sitcoms to fast food to movies to banks. There are, of course, entire screens devoted entirely to one company, such as the iconic Coca Cola ad screen that plays umpteen Coke ads round the clock, 365 days a year.
Since Times Square is actually a junction on Broadway, we also had a most enjoyable walk down one of the world’s most glamorous streets known to me since Mary Jane (Spiderman’s babe) is a singer/actor (I can’t remember which) on a Broadway show.
Such is the radiance of the place, it’s hard for a city slicker like me not to fall in love with the glittering and flashing psychedelic neon and LED signs all around. Despite the bomb scare just a week ago, the place was teeming with people, tourists mostly, although clearly NYPD had personnel working overtime in the area.
Another thing most likeable about NYC are the numerous cafés and pubs that line almost all the streets of middle and downtown Manhattan. These joints are all full at 5 or so, when the office-going public throng to them to unwind, and most boisterous scenes can be found at these places that invariably have about 4 televisions, one covering each of the 4 popular sports in the US, baseball, basketball, football (the armour-costumed one, not the beautiful game that is soccer to these idiots) and ice hockey. This roadside café culture was evident in Europe as well, and is one of the biggest things we miss in India.
The next two days were spent doing the most typical type of sightseeing, i.e. clicking photos of all the major tourist attractions, garnering a truckload of information that does not last the weekend et al. We saw all the major stuff, such as the Statue of Liberty (unimpressive), the view of Manhattan from atop the Empire State Building (impressive), Ground Zero, Wall Street amid other inconsequential places most of which I have forgotten by now. One memorable moment was when we visited the statue of the Wall Street Bull, a most imposing and aggressive-looking creature, whose privacy is violated daily by millions of tourists, who prefer their photos not catching it by its horns but by the poor creature’s privates.
To see all this stuff, we took a tour of the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus services, which has open top buses running a loop every half hour with encyclopedias for guides to do the commentary. If anyone is keen on visiting in the near or distant future, please not that as far as possible avoid buses with female tour guides and stick to the male ones as they present their stories in far more interesting ways. All the female (mind, you, they are all middle-aged or old, so the other incentive is absent as well) tour guides care about is the ornate architecture of the older buildings and nothing else. By the end of the day, they also coat their mikes with a shade of deep red with their lipstick. I admit the last detail is inconsequential but it is the sort of thing that one cannot help but notice. (This last line has been copied almost verbatim from a Chetan Bhagat novel; if you remember which one, like I can, good and if you remember exactly where, you are a genius, like me).
One interesting observation is that New York does not seem to be quite as fashionable as one would imagine. The people walking the streets range from the highly trendy to downright grungy. Importantly, not once did we look even a touch out of place in our cheap clothing, which is in stark contrast to some of the places in Europe that I have visited, where we felt downright shabby walking past the impeccably dressed locals.
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