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Manhattan,
January 1997
Day 0
On
Tuesday, the 14th of January I was in the middle of winter
break at Berkeley and took the opportunity to visit, for the first time,
Manhattan. During the
previous summer and fall semester I was out of school and working at a
geotechnical engineering firm as an internship, so for the first time, I
had a bit of money. This
was to be my first trip to the east coast, and to save $20 I selected a
ticket on America West that went from Oakland to Las Vegas where I
changed planes before going onto LaGuardia via Columbus, Ohio.
It was a red eye flight and I have a vague recollection of being
in Columbus at 3 am. Day 1
Upon
arriving at the airport I boarded the M60 bus headed downtown got off
once we crossed Madison Avenue. Clearly
I wasn’t paying much attention because I found myself at 125th
street, in the middle of Harlem and ended up walking about 100 blocks to
Rebecca's office. Our
parents have known each other since we were babies and we went to the
same high school, so although not close, I was staying with her in her
great upper west side apartment during my stay. My walk from Harlem from Manhattan was uneventful. Piles of garbage gave way to skyscrapers and eventually I found myself on the east side of Central Park and on the “museum mile”. After dropping off my pack with Rebecca I went to the Empire State Building and on the way explored FAO Schwartz, the Trump Tower, and a Bruno Maglio store (OJ Simpson wore these shoes when he killed his wife). For $4.50 I purchased a ticket and saw the best views from three different viewing levels. While on the main viewing level I took a picture for a young Russian woman with snot running out of her left nostril.
Observation Deck #2 was my next destination but it was closed so I took the NYC subway for the first time back to Rebecca's office before we went back to her apartment. On the way, I stopped to watch a dump truck being doused by firefighters as its refuse burned. |
