Sunday 10th June

Pete is very happy.  He rang yesterday, from Alice Springs.  I could hear BRRRRMMMMM!!!  And BRRROOOOMMMMMM!!  Fink River Races!  “Listen to that!” he would say, in between loud noises.  He had to hide behind a big truck as he spoke, to avoid being showered with thick red dust.  Bliss, I gather…

Shingles are not fun…I am very dopey; possibly from the very strong drugs which are combatting the shingles.  So…mustn’t grumble!  Drugs (in this case) are GOOD!

I haven’t yet mentioned how very important and popular I was on 2XS on Saturday…

The toilet has been wonderful and reliable, mostly, over the many months we spent aboard and abroad.  Pumping away day in day out.  But…on Friday it got all temperamental and refused to do what a good seagoing toilet should do.  The only way it would pump was if someone – ahem – squatted down and tapped on the little motor behind the toilet bowl with a paint scraper, just to keep the pump ticking over.  Pete, in his Safety At Sea speech before we took off from Constitution Dock, tried to describe this manoeuvre, but the concept was a bit hard to grasp.  Apparently.  So all afternoon I was the Hero Of The Toilet.  Our female guests did try, but mostly they failed; they didn’t quite have The Knack.  I felt very wanted and needed as I rushed to the rescue, ready to tap away with the paint scraper.  (And did the men need me?  Well no…They all were very happy to avoid the downstairs toilet completely.)

NYC #2

Yesterday, as promised, was a domestic day spent in our neighbourhood.  As with everything in New York, our planned tasks took much longer than expected, due, mainly, to the difficulty in getting around - everything is so vast and the traffic is so dense, but also to our detours, rubbernecking and general lack of knowledge of the way things operate.

We did eventually find a Fedex office, although it took us about one hour to get to it even though it is only a fraction of a mile on the Google map. We found, to our horror, that it would cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars to Fedex a parcel to Australia.  Our fear is that we will have to dump some of our precious purchases if we are too overweight (or, at least, if our luggage is).  We can check extra luggage in here for only $40 but then would have to pay $15 per kg in Melbourne to Jetstar for anything over 20 kg.  Ripoff - United Airlines let you have another 26 kg. for only $40 from New York to Melbourne.  That same amount of luggage would cost $390 for Jetstar to take across the Bass Strait.  Rip off!  We eventually found a post office where they gave us a free box, but, once filled, will be charged at roughly $10 per lb. or approx $20 per kg.  So, any which way, it is going to cost us a lot to get stuff home.  Just as well we have been buying Tshirts, not shoes, bags and books.

On the way to the post office we had lunch at a cafe, where I did what the skinny New Yorkers must do, and had a lettuce leaf and black coffee lunch.  We found a delightful yarn shop (Barbara had downloaded many yarn shop addresses, but this is the first one we have found).  The people were delightful, the yarn was delicious, and I have added to my luggage problem.  We spoke the international language of knitters and spent a very pleasant hour stroking beautiful yarns, discussing patterns and knitting pastimes such as yarn bombing and yarn crawls.  Yarn bombing, otherwise known as guerrilla knitting, is not unknown, even in Hobart, and we have found examples in the streets of Soho.

Then we went looking for a laundromat, which, at first, was difficult and we walked many blocks, once we found one then, suddenly, they appeared everywhere we looked.  However, in this part of town at least, they are Chinese laundries, with no nice chairs for you to sit on and read whilst waiting for your clothes to finish spinning around, instead they are busy, buzzing places which weigh your bag of dirty clothes and magically, some hours later, give them back to you transformed into such an incredibly neat pile of folded clothes, that they do not even require ironing, and all for very few dollars.

Having read in Lonely Planet about this neighbourhood, which features what are known as Cast Iron Buildings - there are 84 of them, which used to be warehouses and factories making such things as ribbons and laces, we looked and found many such buildings.  The most famous and beautiful one is the Singer building.  They date from the 19th Century.  They are gorgeous, but range from beautifully preserved to various stages of decrepitude.  In, I think, the 70s and 80 artists started moving into these buildings and squatting in them to save them.  New Yorkers have never recovered from the demolition of the Penn Station in the 1960s.  The whole district is now preserved as an historic area, and the lofts etc that the artists moved into have now become apartments worth millions, forcing out the very people who saved them.  Anyway, it was fascinating; the blocks we covered looking for post offices and laundries had the most eclectic range of people and buildings.  There are the "projects" which are multi-storey towers for people of low or no income, sad looking public schools, which go by number, eg Public School No. 33, concrete jungles for the children to play in, alongside the beautiful old buildings worth fortunes, and I bet those rich people don't send their children to the public schools (in fact, they don't even seem to have children - maybe they move tho the burbs once they do?).  The streets are peopled by the super trendy alongside the obviously very poor, and also the homeless.  The shops range from dusty little bodegas to trendy, edgy art galleries, restaurants, bars and upmarket wine.  Every so often there is a narrow strip of garden, which is part of the community gardens project, an attempt to put a little of nature back into the urban environment.

There is the constant sound of fire engines all day and all night (and, whilst acknowledging that fires would have dreadful consequences given the density of the population and the nature of the buildings) I think the fire engines are really just doing blockies.  The trucks are so shiny and the firemen are so handsome.  There are even beefcake calendars of firemen available in the shops, and it seems as though there must be a prerequisite that they be movie star handsome in order to be allowed to join the force.

The older buildings (including ours) all have those typical New York style external iron fire escapes, although I reckon there would be a few broken bones if you tried to escape that way - because they only go down to the first floor level (called second floor here) then there is an iron ladder which gets, in theory, let down to the ground.  This is clearly to prevent bad people from climbing up and breaking in, however, the ladders are now so rusted on that I doubt they could ever be lowered to the ground.  All ground floor windows have bars and grills on them and the doors are so locked and barred and chained that fires would be a very terrible thing.  Our own apartment is very hard to get in and out of (we do have one of those fire escapes).  I had thought they were still there because they are iconic and decorative but the news the other night covered a story of hundreds of people in the Bronx having to be evicted from their apartment building because the landlord had removed the fire escapes.

Yes we have eaten the famous Knishes, and dreadful they were.  The first floor landing is filled with the smell of the knishes cooking, and the second of stale cigarette smoke.  But the worst thing is the dustiness and fustiness of the stairwells, and I would arrive in the apartment gasping and sputtering for breath.  I have now solved that problem by wearing a mask when going up and down, however the iron stairs are so steep and rough that , with my glasses fogged up from my breath, I am now in imminent danger of breaking my legs falling down the stairs.  So, the choice is between being able to breathe and being able to walk.

Our apartment has some guest books in it in which people write their impressions.  There are many references to the fantasticness of the neighbourhood (true) and the fabulous nature of the apartment (not true).  We suspect those entries might have something to do with the fact that the guests are hoping to get their $500 deposit returned.  Some pages have been, somewhat suspiciously, torn out.  One that, surprisingly remains, reads: "couldn't fit on toilet so used vanity. I wish the person downstairs would open a window when they smoke, it's like sleeping in an ash tray that's on a tilt." It is true that the toilet area is so very small that we have difficulty getting into it - but, oh, the thought of previous guests using the handbasin as a toilet is not nice to contemplate.  It is also true that the floor of the apartment is on a somewhat alarming tilt.  But still, as advertised, "small and cosy" and "live like a real New Yorker"

Today, our plan is to go to the Museum mile and take in some more Kultcha.  I forgot to mention the second fabulous exhibition that was on at MoMA.  A huge exhibition of Cindy Sherman's photographic work.  Barbara and I both loved it.