Monday, September 6, 2010

People photographing (4)

this mother is taking a picture of 2 of her children in front of the liberation monument. she was hoping that her son would look just like the soldier above, except that the boy did not at all understand what was expected from him. he kept looking up and smiling, while she kept asking him to look as in the sculpture above. it took soooo long that i could take 4 crappy pictures before i had one i was satisfied with. then the father, holding their other kid (hes on the left), demonstrated how the boy was supposed to hold his brother, and how he then had to hang his head backwards instead of looking up. pfff, what would they eventually do with this picture?! worst of all, some girls climbed onto the statue, clearly disrupting the entire image....
ah, in the back there is the statue of liberty. earlier that day we passed the endless row of people waiting to get onto a ferry towards it (4.3 million people visit it/year), surely we skipped that! we wanted to take a ferry to the liberty state park, as you have such a nice view on manhattan/lady liberty from there. but walking all the way from world trade center through battery park, staten island ferry terminal, we reached pier 9 close to the brooklyn bridge to find out that there is no ferry service at that point during weekends. by then we were so tired that we went there by car later on, just before driving back to boston. from there we saw the sunset over manhattan and it was truly scrumptious!! :)

Beware of...

... dutch people not wanting to pay for anything... :) hahaha. it was the first weekend of the month, and then certain museums are for free with our bank of america card! an advantage of having a bank account with (at?) that bank. of course i had looked up which museums were for free in New York. on saturday we went to the museum of metropolitan art, and on sunday we went to the intrepid (picture above is on that enormous boat). tim wanted to go to the latter (i wanted to go to the first), i was not that interested in all those different aircrafts... i dont know whether other visitors really looked at all those planes, if only through the lens of their camera. my goodness, so many pictures were taken there. you could hardly walk around without being in someone's pic... all in all, we saved 80 dollars of entrance fee!! quite a lot. but then we spent 50 dollars on a very bad meal in a bad restaurant on 33th street (close to the empire state building), next day we just went to mac donald's; a whole lot better...

Cab repair

the past 2 days we were in New York!! we were thinking of it on monday, we dismissed the idea on tuesday (no hotel available), we booked a cheap room/w free parking in jersey city on wednesday (close to where i used to live for 3 months, 6 yrs ago already). left at 7 on saturday, and drove to NY!! it all went smooth, until we were in front of the Holland tunnel (our shabby hotel was right at the other side). soooo much traffic!! when we finally lined up, a cab behind us was trying to go right through us, and tim even asked him to be a little more patient. few seconds later, the guy just drove against the back of ours!! idiot!! nice start.... although traffic was really crazy, we freaked out the cab driver by calling 911 (but the idiot just bumped into the car!!), and refused to move any further. he then threw some money into tim's lap (20 dollars) and asked him to please please cancel the cops, as he could loose his license, and his customers (they just got out and were about to leave). yes, blah! then luckily we saw that in fact our car was not damaged at all (except a bit of yellow paint from his cab on the bumper, easily removable). his front however... pfew, we were lucky!! we then decided to leave it and just drive on, as we were on the most awful spot to be standing still.
later that day we passed the 24 hour (!!) garage where they refurbish cabs... it was a beautiful scene; but i was too shy to take a picture... :( sooo stupid! i was annoyed about that the rest of the day. the next day we went there again, and then i did take some pics (see above), but it wasnt as nice as the day before..... :( and in fact they didnt mind at all! even, they said that now they probably will be celebrities very soon...