Saturday 16 June

A very local story which amused me no end…

A young chickybaby of our acquaintance works in…Chickenfeed!  This is a bright red LOUD and CHEAP (cheep cheep!) discount shop.  Everything is CHEAP.  Not necessarily cheap and nasty, but definitely cheap.  Michael always says, “Never buy anything from Chickenfeed if you want to rely on its strength, Ma.”  That includes: furniture, hammers, stickytape, glue…I once bought a set of Philips head screwdrivers which bent and twisted most alarmingly when confronted with a very small screw embedded in something quite soft…

So…recently I was walking through Chickenfeed when I heard Emma, at the check-out – “Marguerite!  A man has just been very rude!  He made a complaint!”  And out came the sorry tale… A respectable-looking man in a business suit, in his forties, thought Emma, had queried the price of an item he was buying.  “That is incorrect!  It is $8.95, not $10!” he thundered.  Emma checked and found that it was indeed $10 when the barcode was scanned, but maybe it was on special?  She apologised and called the manager who poured oil on troubled waters while the customer fumed away self-importantly.  He eventually left, still muttering, “It’s not good enough!”  And what was the gorgeous item he was buying??  Well…a zebra-striped slanket!!

If I were buying a zebra-striped slanket I would NOT draw attention to myself at all…
(For those of you fortunate enough not to know what a slanket is…well, it’s a ghastly garment to be worn while slothing about on the couch watching TV, a sort of back-to-front dressing gown.)

Out of order NYC episode – somehow I missed one!

As we all know, Americans are excessively patriotic and insular (someone asked me if Australia was closer than England to the US).  The extreme patriotism is not so obvious when trekking through the streets of New York, but becomes very apparent when visiting the iconic patriotic symbols, two of which we did yesterday.  We passed the Statue of Liberty on the (free) Staten Island ferry and we queued for hours in the heat to get into the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero.  On both occasions I was very moved by what they represented and had a big lump in my throat thinking about the history of both.  (By the way, the Statue of Liberty does not actually belong to NYC, but to New Jersey, which is responsible for its upkeep).
The Staten Island ferry takes thousands and thousands of people each day over to the Island, which is one of New York City's boroughs, and is, amazingly, Republican and has tried (unsuccessfully) to secede from the much too liberal New York City.  Half a million people live there, but it is so disregarded that every day, tens and tens of thousands of people get the ferry for the Statue of Liberty experience, then get right off the ferry and get the next one back, without even leaving the ferry terminal.  We, however, walked through the heat and along some dusty roads and found ourselves in a most depressing and run down working class area, with not even a trendy coffee bar to be seen.  Difficult to understand really, right by the water, near fast, free transport to Manhattan and with breathtaking views of the Lower Manhattan skyline.  However, it is my observation that the views that are sought after are the views of Central Park, rather than water views, with many, many, large housing projects built right on the edge of the water, giving poor people the most stunning of views, by our standards at least.  We were rewarded for our efforts in actually setting foot on Staten Island by the most delicious of salads with shrimp and scallops (each scallop weighing about 200g) at a local pub.  The scallops were so delicious that I bought some more last night and cooked them here in the small cubicle erroneously described as a "kitchen" by the apartment's owner.
I don't understand New York real estate.  Our first four fabulous days were spent in Williamsburg, Billyburg to us Noo Yorkers, which is, frankly, an ugly neighbourhood full of old warehouses and factories, which are now worth zillions and it is the hippest neighbourbood in New York.  We loved it, but it was hot and dirty and all the bridges from Brooklyn to Manhattan are constantly gridlocked.   It is hard to work out how some areas are desirable (Billyburg) and others not (Staten Island city-side waterfront).
We began our trek to Staten Island by bus.  I really thought I had the bus thing worked out.  I knew which route to take, we had our metro tickets, we got on at a bus stop which allows you to use your metro tickets (some stops are pay per ride and you have to buy an individual ticket from a machine - we made that mistake once and illegally rode all the way uptown without a ticket), the internet told me the buses would come every three minutes, and would go to the desired destination.  Two hours later, we finally arrived.  We got on the bus with right number, but it only went half the distance.  So we got a transfer ticket and waited for one which would go all the way.  Three passed without stopping, we were, it seems, at a stop at which only some of the buses stopped.  There are Limited buses and Express buses and buses which do not go the whole way, but they all have the same route number displayed.  We will have it all worked out by the time we return (although my taxi-hailing magic is still working.)
The bus took us through Lower Manhattan, the financial district, and we went past Wall Street.  I had expected the streets (canyons) to be full of Gordon Gecko types in suits, striding purposefully along, cell phones (as they are called here) to their ears as they barked out instructions to sell this and buy that.  Not so, it was all very casual, almost vacation-like.  I guess that now the Masters of the Universe have destroyed the world's economy there is not much left for them to do.
Outside the ferry terminal, when we came back to Manhattan, was a team of buskers.  They were an incredibly athletic group of black men who did triple somersaults and the like over hot concrete (and over "volunteer" audience members) whilst keeping up a very funny and racially-based patter that only black people would be able to get away with.
Then we walked to Ground Zero.  There is an amazing construction effort going on, building what will replace the old World Trade Centre.  Tall glass structures reflecting the sky and New York.  There will be a spiral of new towers around the eight acre memorial, one of which will be the tallest building in the United States.  We waited in the "line" for ages to get through to the Memorial, which consists of two pools on the exact footprints of the Twin Towers.  The pools have waterfalls flowing into them.  Surrounding the pools are bronze ledges with the names of all those who died on the day.  One has the names of all the first response people, which was very sad, inscriptions such as "Ladder 11,” "Engine 323," "Brigade 21" and their names.  The other pool has the names of the people who died in the towers, the Pentagon and the planes.  Then there are lawns with trees planted including the one tree that has survived from the original World Trade Centre.  It has been nursed back to health and replanted.   It is all surprisingly low key for America, apart from the inscripted names there are no other words, plaques or anything describing what actually happened, although there is a museum being constructed on the site which will, no doubt, do just that.  Even though, eventually, when it is all completed, people will have free access from the streets, for some reason at this point in time there is a very overt police presence and high-tech screening to get in (of the same nature as American airport screening).  There are also big black vehicles with windows you cannot see into parked in the streets nearby and SWAT teams standing, bedecked with scary hardware, and with thousand yard stares.  Plus hundreds of ordinary NYC police cars and police persons.  Poor Barbara was shouted at for taking a photo during the screening process, although there were no limits on taking photos of the memorial or the construction.  Go figure.
Actually, Barbara has been shouted at by a number of functionaries, and has a particularly bad record with bus drivers from whom she has tried to get information, such as where to get off.  Yesterday, for only the second time, we had a friendly and helpful driver, so she related some of her experiences.  He said to her, "Ma'am, I don't want to be a bad ambassador for my city, but living in New York is hard.  You are nice people who are visiting, but the people who live here, if they speak to us, they just abuse us."  So, he said, they basically try to protect themselves by discouraging engagement with their passengers.  There is a sign in buses that says that if you attack bus drivers it is a felony carrying a penalty of seven years' imprisonment.  I guess those signs are there for a reason.
One last little vignette - when we lived in Billyburg, I picked up a free local newspaper, a bit like the Mt Stuart Times and, just like the Mt Stuart one, there was a half page Crime Watch section.  Now, in West Hobart it reports such things as the theft of power tools from a garage and the damaging of a parked car.  The Billyburg one had two small paragraphs concerning two homicides, another small one about an armed bank robbery, and a large story about a "grand larceny" which was the theft of an iphone on the subway.  Priorities.