New York City! Love it!
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2008
1
13
14
Trip End
Oct 06, 2008
New York City,
New York,
United States
Monday, October 6, 2008
Yesterday was positively surreal. Jerry and I just shook our heads, dazed, at the end of it. We were rained out at the Eiffel Tower--saw it in all it's magnificence, but the weather was so windy, cold, and rainy, that we bagged it on climbing/elevating up the tower and dashed into the nearest museum that would take our museum passes. This turned out to be the Museum of French Architectural Heritage, or some such, and quite interesting; the history of gargoyles and flying buttresses and moats, all of it, much reproduced for display--arches, windows, facades.
By 2:30 we were being chauffeured by a most kindly African man in his brand-new cab. The only sticky spot was when he got out a brochure while speeding along the freeway and tried to read it to see which terminal we needed for American Airlines. Finally, he passed the brochure over to us, and I studied it: Terminal 2A. When we arrived at the airport, though, there were no signs indicating which door for which airline, so he dropped us off at one end of the terminal. Once again heavily laden (I had suggested to J. at the apartment that we just fling my heavy case down the center of the spiral staircase and hope for the best), we had to wander aimlessly to find where to check-in.
Then the system for checking bags and then clearing security was truly astounding--it was like being a Berkeley freshman and being sent from Sproul to here to there back to Sproul, get a signature, get stamped, be lectured. We had to get out our passports no fewer than four times, and I had to be patted down and a wand waved over my body (my wedding ring?) Then, apparently disinterested, they waved me on. More questions and passports at the boarding gate.
The plane was full. We sat behind people who HAD to recline their seats all the way back, quite uncomfortable for us (and then, of course, one has the moral dilemma of screwing the people behind us by doing the same). Flight was over 7 hours to New York due to head winds. But on the ground things went swiftly, and I was so delighted to be back at the Lucerne Hotel. Having been to Europe--or some small part of it--the brashness of American culture is more obvious to me and why all the look-down-the-nose at it in past decades (Abstract Expressionism, flappers, whatever). I'm really glad we stopped here on the way home.
Which finishes up tonight! We take the 5:30 pm JetBlue flight to Oakland, where Claudia will pick us up. In the meantime--believe it or not, one more museum--I want to get down to the newly remodeled/relocated Museum of Art and Design, which just reopened at Columbus Circle wit a show called "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary."
In the meantime: bagels! The NY Times! But no rainy days over a gray Seine, no extravagant bouquets of flowers being carried home, no adorable toddlers in leggings, no beautiful language. We would watch from our window in Paris as a couple in an apartment across the street had a candlelight dinner every night, a bottle of wine, a bouquet of flowers (lately gladioli) on their white pedestal Knoll table. With the tidy small wineglasses of the French, and geraniums blowing in their windowboxes.
Home, but what a trip it was...
Comments
Welcome back!
Suggest that you delay reading NYT or any other media source for awhile, to keep enjoying the blissful feeling of being elsewhere. You are just in time for presidential campaign to ramp all the way up to disgracefully cruel and untrue, and the economic scene is beyond bleak. So stick with the neighbors with the flowers and wine and the gargoyles for a bit longer!
Cheers!