In a New York Minute
Several years ago, the Felagund family used to make an annual trek every December to New York City for the day. It was a nice day: time for a leisurely lunch, to wander around the city, capped off with the Radio City Rockettes' show, and followed by a walk back to the bus that involved an inevitable stop for sandwiches at Pret a Manger. Then, under the pretense of The EconomyTM, the bus company stopped running this trip. This year, they started it back up again (perhaps because The EconomyTM has supposedly improved).
Dad asked if we wanted to go, and the decision was instantaneous: Of course we did! To make matters even better, the trip was on a Thursday this year--it had always been on a Monday before, the one day of the week that the Met is closed--so I indulged a fantasy of meeting heartofoshun for lunch, taking the subway to mill about the Met for a couple of hours, and returning in plenty of time to see the show.
But then we got the itinerary. It was ... quite different. In the past, we arrived in NY around 11 and the show was at 4, which gave us plenty of time to have lunch and still have several hours for sightseeing. This year, we arrived at 11:30, went to the 2 o'clock show, and left immediately after. Do the math. If we had to be in the queue for the show around 1:30, that allowed two hours for ... well, everything else. Part of the reason why the time was so short is that the bus company decided this year to stop in both directions for at least a half-hour "fast food break." Right-o. Because you're going to a city with some of the world's finest restaurants, so eating soggy fried chicken that's been warming under a heat lamp for two hours is an obvious necessity.
The trip was yesterday. Up until the last minute, I was debating whether to tell Oshun I was coming up. We haven't gotten to hang out in years, and I thought that maybe even a quick lunch would be better than nothing. I'm glad, in retrospect, that I did not. (Especially given her poor shoulder!) We were more rushed than even the itinerary had made me believe. We were dumped off on 6th Avenue. We walked over to Times Square. We walked around Toys 'R' Us for about ten minutes to warm Dad up. We stopped at a cafeteria-style place to eat, which took about a half-hour in an overheated dining area crushed elbow-to-elbow with people on their lunch breaks. We saw the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. (For anyone who has never been to NYC, walking between all of these places took probably a grand total of 30 minutes.) Then it was time to line up for the show. We never would have had time to have a longer lunch; it would have been a waste of Oshun's time.
The show was billed to my dad as considerably different from the last time we'd seen it. It wasn't. It was good, but I've seen it so many times now that I've lost count. There was one new number. Some new scenery and different costumes. Oh, and there were more opportunities to incorporate advertisements into the show itself. We also had the worst seats we've ever had: the next-to-last row in the mezzanine. I forgot to mention that for the two of us, we paid about $325 for all this?
After the show was a mad rush back to the bus. We'd been threatened by the bus tour guide--the bus had a tour guide, yes, not a great idea, imo*--that we had fifteen minutes. No time for Pret, and the crowds were so ridiculous that pedestrians were getting stuck in the streets when the lights changed and being yelled at by the NYPD. It was 4 o'clock when we left, which put us right on time to sit in rush hour traffic going through the Lincoln Tunnel.
* Think non-ironic Christmas-print turtleneck. Much too chirpy. Prayed over the bus as we set out and was sure to include "our men and women in uniform" in that syrupy glop of ritualistic goodness. And, as the city came into sight, delivered a "we're almost in the city be suitably afraid and lock up your valuables omg there might be brown people" lecture, yet managed not to mention the scam artists in Times Square, by whom my inlaws got taken in not once but twice, once by a rap artist who sold my father-in-law a "free CD" and another time by a costumed character who agreed to pose for a photo with Amiah and then refused to let her go until my mother-in-law gave a tip. (I made up the part about the brown people, but that's always shimmering just below the surface when middle-class white people freak out over How Scary The City Is.)
And with the addition of the "fast food stops," the bus ride was four hours each way. So we spent about eight hours on the bus and a little over four hours in New York, most of it sitting in the next-to-last row of the mezzanine, trying to see around the big head of the guy seated immediately in front of me. At least, in that eight hours, I got a big chunk of reading Adam Smith done. I was somehow sore and exhausted--from what? From sitting on my ass on a tour bus all day!
So yeah. I don't want to say it was a bad day--the show was good, the city beautiful at Christmas time, as it always is--but it is not an experience I will be repeating anytime soon and was honestly horribly disappointing. Bobby and I have already talked and decided that, if we want to do NY at the holidays next year--which we almost certainly will--then we will take the regular bus up for the weekend and arrange for our own show tickets and then be able to do whatever restaurants, museums, and visits with friends we want to do. I felt worse for my inlaws and cousins: This was Amiah's first trip to NY, and my cousins brought their son who has autism for the first time as well, and all the kids involved ended up disappointed at one point or another because they couldn't see or do something that they really wanted to see or do because there simply was not time.
But there was Cinnabon to be had, in both directions! :^|
We did manage to stop walking just long enough to snap some cell phone photos in front of the Rockefeller Center tree.
It was back to work today, and a couple of my coworkers asked if I saw or got involved in any of the protests about the murder of Eric Garner and I had to say, no, there wasn't time! If I hadn't known, I wouldn't have known from my glimpse of the city yesterday that there were even protests going on.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
http://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/352426.html
Dad asked if we wanted to go, and the decision was instantaneous: Of course we did! To make matters even better, the trip was on a Thursday this year--it had always been on a Monday before, the one day of the week that the Met is closed--so I indulged a fantasy of meeting heartofoshun for lunch, taking the subway to mill about the Met for a couple of hours, and returning in plenty of time to see the show.
But then we got the itinerary. It was ... quite different. In the past, we arrived in NY around 11 and the show was at 4, which gave us plenty of time to have lunch and still have several hours for sightseeing. This year, we arrived at 11:30, went to the 2 o'clock show, and left immediately after. Do the math. If we had to be in the queue for the show around 1:30, that allowed two hours for ... well, everything else. Part of the reason why the time was so short is that the bus company decided this year to stop in both directions for at least a half-hour "fast food break." Right-o. Because you're going to a city with some of the world's finest restaurants, so eating soggy fried chicken that's been warming under a heat lamp for two hours is an obvious necessity.
The trip was yesterday. Up until the last minute, I was debating whether to tell Oshun I was coming up. We haven't gotten to hang out in years, and I thought that maybe even a quick lunch would be better than nothing. I'm glad, in retrospect, that I did not. (Especially given her poor shoulder!) We were more rushed than even the itinerary had made me believe. We were dumped off on 6th Avenue. We walked over to Times Square. We walked around Toys 'R' Us for about ten minutes to warm Dad up. We stopped at a cafeteria-style place to eat, which took about a half-hour in an overheated dining area crushed elbow-to-elbow with people on their lunch breaks. We saw the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. (For anyone who has never been to NYC, walking between all of these places took probably a grand total of 30 minutes.) Then it was time to line up for the show. We never would have had time to have a longer lunch; it would have been a waste of Oshun's time.
The show was billed to my dad as considerably different from the last time we'd seen it. It wasn't. It was good, but I've seen it so many times now that I've lost count. There was one new number. Some new scenery and different costumes. Oh, and there were more opportunities to incorporate advertisements into the show itself. We also had the worst seats we've ever had: the next-to-last row in the mezzanine. I forgot to mention that for the two of us, we paid about $325 for all this?
After the show was a mad rush back to the bus. We'd been threatened by the bus tour guide--the bus had a tour guide, yes, not a great idea, imo*--that we had fifteen minutes. No time for Pret, and the crowds were so ridiculous that pedestrians were getting stuck in the streets when the lights changed and being yelled at by the NYPD. It was 4 o'clock when we left, which put us right on time to sit in rush hour traffic going through the Lincoln Tunnel.
* Think non-ironic Christmas-print turtleneck. Much too chirpy. Prayed over the bus as we set out and was sure to include "our men and women in uniform" in that syrupy glop of ritualistic goodness. And, as the city came into sight, delivered a "we're almost in the city be suitably afraid and lock up your valuables omg there might be brown people" lecture, yet managed not to mention the scam artists in Times Square, by whom my inlaws got taken in not once but twice, once by a rap artist who sold my father-in-law a "free CD" and another time by a costumed character who agreed to pose for a photo with Amiah and then refused to let her go until my mother-in-law gave a tip. (I made up the part about the brown people, but that's always shimmering just below the surface when middle-class white people freak out over How Scary The City Is.)
And with the addition of the "fast food stops," the bus ride was four hours each way. So we spent about eight hours on the bus and a little over four hours in New York, most of it sitting in the next-to-last row of the mezzanine, trying to see around the big head of the guy seated immediately in front of me. At least, in that eight hours, I got a big chunk of reading Adam Smith done. I was somehow sore and exhausted--from what? From sitting on my ass on a tour bus all day!
So yeah. I don't want to say it was a bad day--the show was good, the city beautiful at Christmas time, as it always is--but it is not an experience I will be repeating anytime soon and was honestly horribly disappointing. Bobby and I have already talked and decided that, if we want to do NY at the holidays next year--which we almost certainly will--then we will take the regular bus up for the weekend and arrange for our own show tickets and then be able to do whatever restaurants, museums, and visits with friends we want to do. I felt worse for my inlaws and cousins: This was Amiah's first trip to NY, and my cousins brought their son who has autism for the first time as well, and all the kids involved ended up disappointed at one point or another because they couldn't see or do something that they really wanted to see or do because there simply was not time.
But there was Cinnabon to be had, in both directions! :^|
We did manage to stop walking just long enough to snap some cell phone photos in front of the Rockefeller Center tree.
It was back to work today, and a couple of my coworkers asked if I saw or got involved in any of the protests about the murder of Eric Garner and I had to say, no, there wasn't time! If I hadn't known, I wouldn't have known from my glimpse of the city yesterday that there were even protests going on.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
http://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/352426.html