Volume 13: Pete in NYC Part 1 - Occasionally going to sleep in the city that suggests you shouldn't
Day 1 – The longest day in human history
You ever find yourself 3 weeks out from planned vacation time with no plans, only to find yourself thinking “You know what? I haven’t been to New York in 12 years. I wouldn’t mind going back there”. Yes, the benefit of being a single man with no children. No budget constraints, no lets pack the 3 or 4 kids up and drive for 5 hours, to reach our destination of a caravan park where we’ll spend the first hour cleaning vomit out of the back seat as we were foolish enough to have so many kids at least 1 of them is going to get motion sickness. No, when you’re a single man with no children the only possibility of vomit on a vacation is when you’re in a bar and you suggest to a newly acquired friend whose name you have just forgotten “I think we would bond a lot quicker over tequila shots”. Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, this adventure takes me back to New York City for the first time in 12 years. The last time I was there was for my 30th birthday, where I made memories I’d soon forget over a very appropriately named beverage called a “mind eraser”. Time to make some new memories New York City, this time memories I would remember.
This epic journey would start with an Uber trip to the airport. The flight was at 9:30am, so I ruled out public transport to get to the airport as I would have been up before I went to sleep; queue Uber pickup. This was an interesting experience. First the Uber driver questioned whether I knew how much this trip to the airport was going to cost. Which I found odd and immediately my mind went to this driver clearly must have been a taxi driver in the past and his expansive training taught him he could rip off someone going to the airport. Melbourne taxi driver training largely consists of:
· lesson 1: learn how to rip off people,
· lesson 2: learn good public hygiene,
· lesson 3: learn the suburbs and major locations of the city
It should be noted lessons 2 and 3 are optional, and as such, are rarely done.
Sensing the confusion in my voice as I tried to think of an answer to his question that wouldn’t get me ripped off (I’m in an Uber for Pete’s sake! How can he doctor the meter?!?) he then launched into a sales pitch for rival ride service Ola, pointing out it would have been significantly cheaper using Ola and the driver would receive a larger share of the fare. I now begun to wonder if the flight attendants on my upcoming United flight would take a similar approach and point out over drink service how much I could have saved if I chose to fly Qantas.
From a riveting sales pitch that had me all in on investing in rival Ola, he then asked me if I was married. The driver was a gentlemen from the sub-continent, and having worked with a great many of his countrymen the last 15 years I knew the concept of a man over 30 and not married was as foreign a concept to him as it was to me having a rival product sold to me whilst using a product, so I knew me telling him I was travelling solo would be something he might not be able to comprehend. To be honest, I think it would have been easier to say my wife died in a freak mechanical bull accident whilst trying to win a free “No bull! I conquered the bull!” t-shirt, then to tell this driver I was a single man who’d never been married. With the driver still struggling to comprehend how I was still single (I know right? I’m a deceptively handsome man, thanks for inferring that) he then said “Why would you get married”. You’ll note my absence of a question mark there, because that’s how I interpreted it; as a statement. But it may well have been a question.
Finally, at the airport after an awkward Uber ride, it was quite a brisk trip from check-in to clearing customs, with the only real obstacle being a United employee asking me to prove I had a return flight back to Australia. My initial thought was he must have assumed I would try to stay in New York and work as catwalk male model, but in reality, it was probably because my return flight was booked through Hawaiian Airlines.
Once through customs it’s onto a giant shopping mall, looking to extract every last Aussie dollar making itself less than useful my having no purchasing power at your next international destination. Judging by the number of expensive stores I saw as I walked to my gate, there’s a lot of businessmen cheating on their wives whilst in Australia, buying expensive jewellery as either a way to say sorry or way of drawing attention away from the lipstick on their work shirts.
As you continue your walk through the shopping mall/airport you are greeted by colourful pandas, each in unique colourways with announcements over the PA in both English and Chinese, but then what just seemed to be in Chinese. I almost expected to see a “Thank you for visiting China” sign, but I suppose that won’t happen until our federal government sells parliament house and a Chinese flag is flying high above it.
Once at the gate having navigated the shopping mall/airport, I was greeted by an Asian/American United employee. He checked my face against my passport multiple times, to the point I almost said “its not racist to think all us whiteys look the same” but there’s always that annoying voice that suggests you shouldn’t.
Once on the flight, this leg Melbourne to LA, it was comforting to see United had hired a flight crew so old they were not only around at the birth of manned flight, but in all likelihood had worked as nannies for the Wright brothers. 100+ years of flight experience per flight attendant is comforting in that you know they would have seen and handled all manner of emergencies in that century, but less comforting knowing they may well die of natural causes on the 14 hours from Melbourne to LA.
I arrived in LA 20 minutes behind schedule, which was now starting to make the 1 hour 15 minutes before my connecting flight to New York look more ambitious than realistic. Thankfully, there is a magically piece of orange people with the words “express connection” that can make ambitious tasks become realistic. I flashed the orange paper at customs to skip the long lines, almost feeling like a head of state given priority entrance into the country, before making the mad dash to terminal 7. The universe, of course, having given me this magical orange paper had to give me another obstacle to make this connection more challenging. My connecting flight was at terminal 7; a half kilometre sweaty spralk (the act of combining a sprint with a walk). At gate 7, I flashed the magical orange paper again, almost passed out at security, reaching my gate as the flight was boarding. I took a deep breath and thought in line “Peter Hart; you logistical genius bastard! Only a genius could minimise connection times to a matter of minutes over a distance spanning 12,000+ kilometres”. And to think just an hour earlier that thought was instead “Pete you fucking idiot! No fucking way you’re making this connection! Why the fuck did you book such a short time between connections?!? Fuckwit!”.
It turned out my day was turning out a lot better than most people connected with that flight. The United booking system had decided to randomly tell people they had been upgraded on this flight, so a bunch of people had arrived at the gate thinking they’d hit the jackpot, only to be told otherwise. It would be like thinking you won lotto, only for the announcer to say he accidentally pronounced the last number.
On board a plane; a place where you discover women see the 2 bag carry on limit as a mere suggestion, and you should instead carry on as much as you can carry on.
Something in the vicinity of the time it takes the earth to make 1 rotation, I finally had made it to Newark Airport. At Newark Airport you catch the Airtrain to Newark Liberty Airport train station, and from there it’s a relatively short NJ Transit ride to NYC. You have to respect someone who has the sense of humour to put 2 Penn stations on the 1 train line and the complete and utter confusion that could cause for someone who’s just landed in a new country. If you’re going to Manhattan, you’ll want to get off at New York Penn station, not to be confused with the Newark Penn station you will travel through to get to the other Penn station. Yes, its quite possible to travel from Penn station to Penn station and for that to make sense. Whilst confusing, not as confusing as living in the USSR when Stalin decided to name everything after himself.
Off at Penn station MANHATTAN, I walked the 11 blocks to my hotel, the Hyatt Centric Times Square. Somehow I seemed to be walking directly against the flow of traffic, just to make the last stage in this epic journey all the more painful. I reached the hotel in fading light, checked in and was looking more forward to this shower than a teenage boy’s first trip to a strip club. Dazed and confused from so much time in transit I couldn’t figure out how the shower tap worked, which sounds like I must be mentally defective, but you’d be surprised how many different ways there are to extract water from a tap. Anyway, that was a minor concern after I left the hotel room only to discover my room key now didn’t work when I tried to get back in. For some reason, a voice told me to try my room key again after I left the room. The voice proved to be wise, so I went back to the hotel front desk to seek an explanation. This must be a frequent occurrence as the bloke on the front desk immediately sent up a maintenance bloke to put new batteries in the room lock. Embarrassed, but still longing for this shower like a teenage boy would his first set of naked boobs, I asked the maintenance bloke to decrypt the shower taps for me. As it turns out, the tap was simply tightly turned, and all it needed was a real man to be able to turn it. Now, all I longed for was a day when I would be a real man.
Showered and somewhat refreshed, I was primed to take on NYC, only for the rain to suggest I postpone that thought for the day. I had dinner at a McDonalds which had a sign that read “occupancy by more than 143 persons is dangerous & unlawful” which seemed an odd number. 143? How do you come up with that? Did they bring like 150 people to the opening, but initially only let 140 in, then just added 1 person at a time until the 144th wouldn’t fit?
After dinner and still dodging the falling rain drops which still fell with an inconvenient frequency, I had 3 pints at a bar I wouldn’t bother to remember or visit again despite it being just 10 metres from the hotel. Service was next to non-existent, to the point it felt like I’d broken into someone’s house and then asked to buy beer from the home owner, who was in bed and had been sleeping peaceful until I was rude enough to ask for a drink.
Anyway, great to be back in NYC!
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