Walking On Empty: Outside the Wire

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Outside the Wire

Me and my herd o' womens went to NYC to see some English-ters put on a production of Macbeth and see the stuff that is cool while we were there. I have been in enough big cities in other parts of the country to have some preconceived notions of what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised, it was a nice place to hang out for several days. Some musings from the trip:

Traveling to the big city by trains is cool.

There's a tremendous amount of abandoned real estate along the railways between DC and NYC.

I know the railways don't always travel through the best parts of cities, but I never expected Baltimore to be such a dump ... wow ... sketchy-town USA.

We may have been the only English-speaking tourists there.

City folk don't like city noises so they all wear earphones when they are outside.

The Walk/Don't Walk signs don't really mean Walk/Don't Walk.

During the World Cup season - and only then - you can wear safety-green or day-glo-orange shoes without folk chuckling at you.

Men can wear skinny jeans if they roll the legs up past the ankle and pair them with brightly colored leather dress shoes ... we saw lots of red ones. The exception is when wearing black leather skinny jeans which must be tucked into high-top tennis shoes.

The yellow ones don't stop.

Europeans think jorts are cool.

I was never overly concerned for our safety at any time we were there.

Navigating the city was very easy because most streets are numbered, not named; traveling on the subway was fine.

Go to Times Square one time - just to say you've been there - then don't waste your time going back. The same goes for Central Park ...meh.

Josh from FACTs was in NYC at the same time ... he was in Manhattan when we were uptown and vice versa tho.

I still don't like Shakespeare plays, even when done by a legit knight and Amy Pond's daughter.

NYC has a bunch of gorgeous old churches that were completely surrounded by super-tall, super-modern buildings.

There's a 75% chance that we might have seen two famous people.

When we were at the Top of the Rock there was no tremendous feeling of being up high, I suspect because the things that were close to us were also pretty tall. I couldn't see my house from there.

I opted to take my GoPro camera instead of my Nikon and it turned out to be a mixed bag. While I definitely enjoyed not having to lug the size and weight of the Nikon, I definitely missed having exposure and zoom control. The GoPro is quite amazing for it's size but it's no match for a real DSLR for still shots. I had to get a little heavy-handed with knocking down the exposure to reduce the glare in a lot of these, a polarizer would have been most helpful.