Not being from around here, I have absolutely no concept of when school holidays are. At least, I didn't used to until I started working in Times Square. It's my least favourite place in Manhattan, pretty much, just because it is so crowded and noisy and messy and smelly. Fortunately, I'm in work for 7am and I usually either leave before or a little after the afternoon rush hour.
Today, however, I left my desk at about 5pm, took the lift down to the lobby, entered the revolving doors and -- I almost couldn't exit the revolving door because of a wall of tourists and commuters outside the building. Suits mixing with families, all moving very slowly in different directions.
I have negative blocks to walk to the subway (as I leave the office building, I'm on the corner of a block and I have to cross south and west) and there were police directing traffic, but it still took me a good five minutes to get inside the subway station.
New York's not quite like London, where people give you haughty looks if you stand on the wrong side of the escalator or generally don't walk in a hurried-looking enough way. It's definitely a bit more chilled, though there's not a lot in it. There's always one New Yorker - and I have to say, usually a woman - who has to assert their supreme right to more space than 99 percent of the surrounding population. This person, today, was shrieking that she had to get through! (Like, now! was the subtext of the whine in her voice).... I wonder sometimes that there hasn't yet been an incident of serious pedestrian rage in a city like New York or London.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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2 comments:
I found that all the tourists in NY were stumbling around looking up, marveling at the skyscrapers and generally careering in to everybody else.
Or that could just have been me.
Interesting point. My own experience of commuting suggests that the average punter switches his/her brain off when leaving a train at Waterloo, having exercised sufficient commuter rage at cellphone or headphone abusers, particularly in 'quiet' carriages. They then descend into the depths below and become zombified hybrid penguin/sardines while waiting for the inevitably delayed underground train to Bank. On arrival they they surface, check their watches and magically return to life. The twenty minutes of subterranean transit are usually conducted in complete silence. Quite bizarre.
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