This is from yesterday. Today I am out at sea but felt like splurging a bit on internet. Nothing new really to report, except that I am confirmed to stay on for one more month until February 11th!

read on about yesterday in New York...

October 3rd

Today we were in New York again, and this time I explored it on my own, by bike. Generally speaking, my route took me south-east through Greenwich Village, all the way down to the financial district, Wall St, and the southern tip of Manhattan, then back north and a little east up to the Empire States Building and Time Square, then back west again to the cruise ship terminal. I saw the Village Vanguard in Greenwich, the jazz club where many of my favourite jazz records were recorded. It was cool to see, although having anticipated it so much I was surprised by how small it is on the outside - it is a basement club so all you see from the outside is the sign and a door which opens to a staircase down. Unfortunately it doesn't open until 8pm, so that was all I got to see. 

There was a random parade for Poland happening in the middle of the city, with dance bands and lots of people with flags. I asked an NYPD officer about it, and he told me that countries like to do this in New York - pick a random day, and make a ruckus - I was amused by his lack of parade spirit.

There are a number of specific details to remember about New York which I will try to write down before I forget.

-You will often hear and even feel the passing of the underground subway when you walk down the street, even through what feels like a pretty thick layer of cement underneath you.

-Biking is a great way to experience New York. Not only are there lots of bike lanes, but since nobody obeys traffic rules, no one will ever honk at you or even give you a dirty look for darting in and out of traffic, crossing multiple lanes and other such biking antics that would work a Vancouver driver into a rage. Rules of the road in a nutshell seem to state that so long as the means don't kill anyone, the ends will justify them.

-In addition to Central Park, New York has a number of small but very well tended parks scattered through-out the city, some with a fountain and/or statue in the middle, or in at least one case a chapel.

-I am constantly surprised by just how conspicuously clean a city New York is . I am told this is quite a recent development, more or less since 9/11.

-The amount of tourists in every part of New York at any given time is mind-boggling. I naively assumed that because I was going to be visiting it during the fall that most people would be back to work or school or some such place, but the tourism in New York seems to ignore the changing of the seasons; to see it this busy at this time of year makes it difficult to imagine what the summer season must be like.

-New York is so filled with significant and picturesque buildings, signs, statues, streets, parks, people and everything else, that as a camera trigger-happy tourist, you have to raise the standard of what you consider photographic, because really just about everything there is, at least by the standard of any other city.

-When going into a tourist shop, leave your polite Canadianism at the door. I entered one such shop and expressed a vague interest in a t-shirt, the clerk instantly zeroed-in on me and would not leave me alone. I, having only expressed the interest out of politeness as a way to try and justify my window-shopping, had no real desire to get this t-shirt, and when I hinted at this fact the clerk asked me if I thought it was too expensive (which it was), and offered to mark off a couple dollars. When I insisted that I just didn't want it, he persisted and kept asking what I wanted to pay for it. This cycle repeated itself quite a number of times, and eventually he just asked me why I didn't want it. By this time one or two other clerks had joined the first in an attempt to make me buy this t-shirt by sheer force of will. Eventually I saw that I was getting nowhere and that there really was no polite mutually acceptable way of me getting out without buying the t-shirt, so I I gave up on tact, turned my back, ignored their parting shouts of "Sir! Sir!" and walked out as quickly as I could. Lesson learned.

-There are a lot of cool and cheap items for sale in these tourist areas, and I came close to buying some a couple times for fear that I would not be able to find another store that sold those items. As it turns out every tourist-spot in New York seems to sell all of the same things, so that concern was ungrounded. One cool tourist attraction was that all over New York are artists who will draw a caricature of you for only $5. I have never seen these people elsewhere, but in New York they are a dime a dozen. 

-There technically are a lot of Starbucks' in New York, but because the city is so full of other far more interesting places they didn't seem particularly noticeable to my Vancouver eyes;  Starbucks' are far easier to find (or rather harder to avoid) in Vancouver.

-American Macdonalds' all seem to have free wifi, which makes my internet-less life at sea a great deal easier.

I still have a lot more of New York to experience and I know that I can't cover it all in just one more visit (next weekend being our last cruise out of New York), but I would at least like to explore the north and east ends a bit, as well as ride to the top of either the Empire States Building or the Rockefeller Centre for a view of the entire city.

After getting back to this ship, we had a sound check and then two Welcome Aboard shows for the new set of passengers. The Groundhog Day effect of working on a cruise ship is starting to set in - every day it feels like it was just the day before that we last played that show, when it was in fact a week ago. So it was tonight, and it definitely didn't feel like a full week ago that we last played these shows.

 the days are starting to pass very quickly. It really is strange how the cruise ship lifestyle warps your sense of the passage of time. 

Tomorrow is our busiest day and also one of my favourites, with the big band brunch, two production shows of Band on the Run, and the Viva Las Vegas show.