Day 4: New York City Rhythm

I'm not sure I'm a fan of New York City. It's loud, smells funny and there are a lot of people and ALL of them are rude. Okay, maybe not all of them, but you're conditioned to give no one eye contact and just worry about you getting from point A to point B.

I really don't like that. No one smiles, no one talks to anyone and people keep cutting in front of me.

This morning I woke up well before my alarm. Which was great, because lying in my comfy comfy bed was awesome.

My day began with a tour at the United Nations across town. The tour paper said to arrive 45 minutes early, so I made sure to arrive an hour early. The problem was, my tour was at 9:45am and the visitors centre doesn't open until 9am. Which would be fine if the security checkpoint wasn't only running two X-ray machines and a large pile of mail was needed to be scanned as well. It also didn't help that security wouldn't let us in, even after 9am, to avoid clogging the security room, so we kept getting pushed back by staff members who received priority.

Luckily, because I arrived so early, I was the first of my tour group to make it through security and as such, when I arrived at the tour desk, they started the tour straight away - with just me in it the group. So for five minutes I had a VIP tour of the Security Council - just me and my tour guide. After five minutes the rest of my tour was filled and we continued as normal. Due to meetings occurring inside the Economic and Social Council Chambers, we didn't stay long in there and were unable to take photos. However, we did have long sessions in both the Security Council and General Assembly. Both are such amazing rooms in design. It was a wonderful experience - even if the tour itself was rather basic level material.

The Main Secretariat Building

The Security Council - New Zealand is currently President

Locations of Peacekeepers deployed by the UN - it was acknowledged that peacekeepers were more than just soldiers. Some are doctors or engineers.

It's a school in a box!

Statue from Nagasaki - this side faced away from the bomb

The side that faced the blast melted

This amazing looking room is the General Assembly - only used for a couple of weeks a year

The famous knotted gun - in the UN Courtyard

After the UN Headquarters, my camera was running low on battery - it had refused to charge last night - so I headed back home. It was nearly lunch time and the plan was to charge my camera whilst I had lunch then get going again. But first, I decided to pick up my New York Pass. And then, seeing I was going to have to walk past it anyway, I pushed my camera to complete flatness by climbing the Empire State Building instead.

The Empire State Building was amazing - still very true to its original art deco style. We were introduced first to the retrofitting that has been undertaken to reduce energy consumption of the building. Apparently, buildings consume 80% of New York City's energy and retrofitting buildings is a much more cost effective method of energy reduction than simply building better buildings. The Empire State's retrofit had reduced energy consumption by 40% - which is incredible. 

We next went to the 80th floor - which is the stage before the observation deck. This is a technological marvel for the 1930s - the highest single elevator ride at the time. On the 80th floor we discovered the numerous engineering feats that resulted in the tower were see being built in a mere 11 months. We also learnt about the skyscraper wars which resulted in the Chrysler building and Empire State and the important role the construction project played in supporting families during part of the Great Depression.

The 102nd floor viewing deck was not available today - but I did go to the 86th floor viewing deck. And this is what I saw:

Pretty Awesome huh

The merchandise shop for the Empire State had a lot of King Kong Gear - included toys in both male and female King Kong. Very cute.

I ended up having McDonald's for lunch again. I wanted to have pizza, but over here you can't customise your own pizza to remove cheese - which I cant eat - so I couldn't have it. Very disappointing.

After lunch I headed to Times Square. Consider my a little underwhelmed by it. There are a lot of billboards - all digital of course - and a reasonable number of people, but not any more than in any other part of New York. Maybe it's all the construction going on. Who knows. Needless to say, I found the scramble crossing in Japan more exciting.

There it is...

That's the famous building - in the background to most movies

I took my opportunity to go buy a Broadway ticket. None of the musicals took my fancy, but TKTS (the discount ticket shop on Broadway) did have tickets to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - which I really did want to go see. Buying them meant I had two and a bit hours to spend in Times Square before the show started.

So I went to the Times Square Discovery Museum to see the Avengers Exhibit. And it was awesome! Being an interactive exhibit, you were recruited as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D and got to test your physical abilities against Captain America's and fly around in Tony Stark's Iron Man Armour thanks to motion  capture technology. Had a totally fantastic time - even if it was supposed to be for young teenagers.

The play itself was pretty good. Having already read the book gave me a good understanding of the plot and why the main character, Christopher, behaved the way he did. The lead actor was fantastic - doing an excellent job of capturing the mannerisms of autism and it was a funny, emotional, performance with some very clever breaking of the fourth wall. The ending where he explained how he solved the maths problem was hilarious - if the fact they had changed the problem to make it easier disappointed me. My only other real disappointment was he didn't explain why he hated bananas. (They start out yellow and end up brown). But overall it was a good play, if sometimes a bit arty, that I feel fairly depicted the book and the experience of autistic children.

Walking out of the Barrymore theatre surprised me with how bright the place was. It was as if someone had just switched on the lights inside the house. It was pretty incredible to see actually.

 

Tomorrow is the public holiday for 4th July. I'm planning to head down towards the World Trade Centre Site and the Statue of Liberty. It's a fair walk (about an hour according to google) so I intend to try my hand at the subway. Wish me luck!