Day 12: New York City

[posted from La Gaurdia airport waiting to fly to Orlando. Sorry for delay; too busy and ran out of interweb data allowance]

Grant…  Today started with a walk to Times Square to collect the Mary Poppins tickets from the New Amsterdam Theater.  Then we jumped on the subway again heading for lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center site.  There were a million people around the WTC site and stacks of construction activity, with temporary fences, trucks, cordoned-off areas etc.  We learned that one reason for the big crowds was that the NY Mayor was scheduled to arrive to make some public announcement about WTC site museum or something.

Anyhow, from what we could see, there are two new buildings being built at the site, and the largest is draped with a super-size-me sized American flag.

The Americans had, quite rightly, erected a pizza bar at the ground zero site and we lined up to sample their fine fare.  Jo reckons it was the best cheese pizza she’d ever had and promptly lined up for a second slice.  After downing the pizza, we walked off to find Wall St so we could take the compulsory Wall St Stock Exchange Building photo.  Some of the (already very narrow) roads in the neighbourhood were cordoned-off by the police to restrict crowd numbers because of a protest that had been happening in the area for the past few weeks.  Jo chatted up a young policeman and got the low-down on his work hours and roster system.

We walked off in the direction of the Staten Island Ferry terminal and, after a few wrong turns, arrived in the fancy new terminal and promptly boarded the next ferry with about a thousand other people, mostly tourists like us.  The ride was quick, efficient and smooth, passing by the Statue of Liberty close enough for a good look.  After arriving on Staten Island, we found there wasn’t much to do so we grabbed a snack while waiting for the next ferry back.

Back on Manhattan Island, we rode the subway a short trip to the East Village where we found the Orpheum Theater where the STOMP show was playing (you know… the one with the guys stomping their feet and banging garbage bin lids to make music). Jo managed to swap her wrongly-ordered August tickets for tickets for that nights’ show, so we were organized for the evening: girls to Mary Poppins in Times Square& boys to STOMP in the lower East Village.

We had dinner together at Ruby Tuesdays where everyone found something yummy to eat and the service was great, albeit a bit pricey.  After dinner, we split to our shows.

STOMP was a magnificent, fun performance from very talented New York cast.  The STOMP crew had performed 5000 shows at that theater over the past 20yrs or so, and had been honoured by the renaming of a section of the street to STOMP St.

After the show, us boys sent a message to the girls, to check earlier plans to meet at Grand Central Station.  The girls replied that they had started the 15min walk back to the hotel and would meet us there. No worries.  Us boys walked to a subway station, waited for a train, caught it back to Midtown, found a toilet, found a shop for drinks and then we got a second message from the girls, some 40min after the first, asking us which street the hotel was!  They’d been wandering the dark streets; not lost of course, but let’s say “with an elevated level of positional uncertainty”.  All turned out okay and after a couple of phone calls for directional assistance, the girls and us ended up back at the hotel together.

It was a late night, and we got to bed at midnight, after Tom had written the previous days’ blog entry.  Hence apologies again that this blog post is late.  Also compounded by the fact we ran out of internet data late today and this post will need to wait ‘till we get to connect again.


from Lucy......
Mary Poppins was the fourth musical/show that I have seen in my whole life and if I had to all the ones that I have seen it would be like this: Wicked, Cirque Du Soleil> Zakana, Mary Poppins then Cinderella on ice. Mary Poppins was good it was very alive with the dancing and the singing. The show was a lot different to the movie and they didn't have all of the parts in the right order and they added parts in that weren't even in the movie, but that only made it more exiting because I have seen the movie and if it was like the movie then I would know what would come next but they changed it and it was partly new for me, For mum she had no idea that it was changed and just went along with it thinking that it was in the movie. Mary Poppins was a good show and if I had to recommend a musical or a play to people in Australia one of the suggestions  would definately be Mary Poppins.