Monday 30th June – On Top Of The World

I woke up this morning feeling pretty hungover from the night before. I’m so glad that I’ve got two and a half days off now, I feel like I have been worked to death over the past week. Rob drove Maria and I down to the Social Security office today at lunch time to sort out getting us social security numbers. Once this was sorted out, we did the same thing people like to do on every day off – we headed into the city

The plan was to check the Empire State Building and Central Park off our list of places to see, though it turned out in the end that we weren’t going to have enough time to do both. We had lunch in a very nice restaurant near Penn Station (though weirdly we were served gherkins and coleslaw as an appetizer instead of bread), before walking to the base of the building.

Even though I knew that this icon of a building was going to be much bigger than all of the buildings around it, I was still overcome with excitement and amazement when we realised that we were almost there and could actually see the building. Despite its height, there aren’t many places where you can actually see the EBS from; due to the fact that you spend your time surrounded by buildings tall enough to block your view.

We obviously chose the wrong time of day to go up the building, because we probably queued up (sorry, ‘waited in line’) about eight times before reaching the top. But the view from the top was definitely worth the wait. It was like standing on the top of the world. We were so high up that all of the skyscrapers that had made me feel minute at ground level suddenly seemed like little model buildings. You could see all the way down to lower Manhattan, across one way to New Jersey, across the other way to Long Island, and up to the Bronx. Before reaching the top, we had gone in a cinema/simulator type thing that simulated a helicopter type ride across the whole city, so by the time we actually reached floor 86, I had a rough idea of what was where.

The Empire State Building took up about two or three hours of the afternoon, and after we had hiked 25 blocks uptown to meet up with Cam, Anahita and Del the day was too late to be able to go to Central Park properly. So we abandoned that idea and hailed a cab with instructions to take us down to Bleeker street so that we could go back the bar we were in this time last week (mainly for Anahita’s benefit). We eat tea in a bar on the edge of Little Italy, where we made our statement about the crap service by leaving a combined tip of less than a dollar. Then we headed back to (what we thought was) the bar we’d spent last Monday in. It turned out that the bar we were looking for was actually next door to Off The Wagon, where Anahita’s dream bartender greeted us with a line of free shots.

I cured the day’s hangover there and then by drinking Newcastle Brown all night, until it was time for us to pile into a taxi to take us back to Penn Station so that we could get the last train back to Locust Valley. Amazingly, I actually managed to stay with the group this time, and spent this Monday night in my bed instead of a subway carriage.