The weekend of August 20-22, 2021 was not at all my first time in New York City. I'd been there more times before than I could count. After all, I've always had relatives in neighboring New Jersey and even lived in that state for a short time, so it's inevitable I'd visit the biggest city in the country more than once. I'd seen the Statue of Liberty up close, walked through Times Square several times in different decades, watched Fourth of July fireworks over the East River, I'd even been to the top of one of the late Twin Towers when I was only five years old during my first ever trip outside of Ohio. But these were nothing more than day trips to Manhattan; I'd never really experienced New York City the way I'd experienced Philadelphia or Berlin or Toronto or any other city I've blogged about here.

I expected this to be an unforgettable trip to another great American city like Philadelphia, where I'd been the week before, or Baltimore where I'd been the week before that. And it was...but it was so much more.

Friday, August 20, 2021

Unlike Philly the previous weekend, I left for New York City on Friday night rather than Saturday morning. It was already dark out when I boarded Amtrak's Palmetto train at BWI airport's rail station. This train makes daily trips between Savannah, Georgia and New York's Penn Station. This trip takes awhile, because the East Coast is long. One of the first things I did after the train started moving was walk to the café car and buy myself a coffee; the man behind the counter said he'd been working since the train started its journey and so he'd been on his feet for the last eight hours.

I think it took just under three hours for the train to reach Penn Station in NYC. It had to not only do the exact same hour-and-a-half journey to Philly that I'd done last weekend, but then continue on from there through New Jersey and finally stop at Penn. I spent most of this ride reading a book I'd bought at the Museum of the American Revolution the weekend before, Never Caught, the story of Ona Judge, the woman who'd escaped a life of slavery in George Washington's Virginia plantation and lived a hard but free life in New Hampshire, never being forced back.

Palmetto pulled to a stop in Penn Station five minutes ahead of schedule. Northeastern Amtrak lines impress me yet again!

It was sometime just after midnight that I found my way out of the maze-like Penn Station and onto the streets of Manhattan. I thought maybe I could use a pint of beer and looked around for a bar but couldn't find one in that area, which was still unfamiliar to me. Eventually I just decided to find the hostel where I was staying, which was in Brooklyn. I had to take the subway, of course, and soon figured out I'd need to take the M line to the Flushing Avenue station. This wasn't the closest station to the hostel, as I discovered later, but was the easiest to get to from where I was.

The hostel where I was headed was called NY Moore Hostel, which is in the neighborhood known as Bushwick. I'd heard of this neighborhood before, alternately described as a rough ghetto and as trendy and gentrified. What I saw didn't fit either description; while I did walk past a block of housing projects to get to the hostel, I wouldn't call it "the ghetto," and while I did later find some nice bars and a coffee shop on another street, it didn't exactly strike me as "Portlandia," either.

Moore Hostel was a pretty nice place to stay. At the time I showed up there, the guy behind the counter where I checked in had a half-drunk bottle of wine which he was willing to share, because, if I recall correctly, he didn't drink alcohol, so I was more than happy to pour myself some. The hostel also had a common area with couches and a big TV where people were watching various shows. At that point I didn't want to do much else besides go up to my room and go to sleep.

Saturday, August 21, 2021

It took a little while to find breakfast that morning. I wanted to eat at an IHOP which was near the Flushing Av subway station, but it was indefinitely closed, so I had to settle for McDonald's. This place was open, but they wouldn't let me eat inside so I had to eat my chicken biscuit sandwich outside on the pavement.

I got a second coffee from a Starbucks on the same street, near the subway station, and got a third from somewhere else I can't remember the name of. I didn't have much of a plan for the day, and just wanted to explore these outer boroughs. I looked up a couple of interesting looking sites on Atlas Obscura, but wasn't able to make it to either. I spent a lot of time just bouncing around Brooklyn on the subway.

WikiTravel says that if Brooklyn was its own city, which it was until 1898, it would be the fourth most populous city in the US. It certainly still feels like its own city, and many of its neighborhoods feel like their own little towns, which they also once were. Riding the subway I got a good view of the neighborhoods the trains went through, since in much of the outer boroughs the subway is an elevated train and not underground. At the Broadway Junction station, where five different subway lines meet, I thought Rockaway Beach looked like a nice place to visit so I boarded the A train in that direction.

This was Rockaway Beach, Queens. There were people surfing here. Remember, this is still within the boundaries of New York City. This was where I first started to realize that New York is much more than a big city.

I didn't bring a swimsuit with me so there wasn't much I could do on the beach. But there was something there that I really liked: between the road and the beach there was a walking/biking path, with plenty of people were there walking and biking on it. I walked along this path for awhile but I was getting hungry and needed to find a place to eat lunch.

The place I stopped at was the Rockaway Brewing Company. Great place for lunch and a beer! For lunch I had an orzo salad with shrimp, accompanied by two of their own beers: FedEx Lager and Original ESB, which was supposed to be in the style of an English ale. I recommend this place for any visitors.

Now, I had to set off on a quest to meet some of the people I'd hoped to up here. There were some relatives of mine over in Rahway, NJ and an old friend from the San Antonio days living in Manhattan and I'd wanted to see them all today. This was, however, not possible as I soon found out. First, I tried to go to Jersey. From Brooklyn this takes longer than outsiders might think. The subway took me to Manhattan where at one station I switched over to a PATH train bound for New Jersey. As I rode this train I was communicating with my cousins trying to arrange to get picked up at the train station in Rahway, but as I watched the minutes tick by I realized there was no way I was going to do all this in one evening.

Since I had to meet my Rahway family anyway two weeks later, I had to make the decision to tell them I couldn't make it this afternoon. Then at Hoboken I stepped off the train and boarded another one going the opposite direction. A subway ride or two later I got back to Brooklyn and the Moore Hostel for a quick shower and change of clothes, then it was off to Manhattan...

By now I'd ridden the subway enough I noticed there were quite a lot of other people riding it as well. Last year I'd heard and read a lot of predictions that the pandemic was killing public transit and everyone was just going to drive their cars everywhere from now on, but those predictions were clearly way off.

Also I'd like to say I liked the food cart vendors who I found in the bigger subway hubs. At Broadway Junction I bought a bag of delicious fresh mango slices.

I had quite a few friends back when I lived in San Antonio who had been scattered around the world in the last few years. One was now living right here in New York City. As the L train brought me back into Manhattan, we talked over the phone about where to meet up, and she suggested a place called Brass Monkey. Looking up this place's location, I found it on Little 12th St in the Meatpacking District.

I liked the name of the place; "Brass Monkey" was also my favorite nightclub in San Antonio. This one is a multilevel bar. In between the catching-up and group selfies we had some beers, of which the two I had I thought were great: a Montauk Pilsener, and something else which was simply labeled as "light" on the tap without a logo. Whatever that second one was, I thought it tasted like a smooth lager.

Next we walked around the corner for dinner at another great place, the Standard Brauhaus. As the last word in the name suggests, this is somewhere you can get German food and beer. What I got was a couple of bratwurst, some sauerkraut, and a small pretzel bread roll. Unfortunately I never wrote down what kind of beer I got but it was served in a boot-shaped mug.

While we were inside the restaurant, not only did the sun set but the rain started falling, and it fell hard. Not wanting to walk through it, I tried calling an Uber, but the cost of an Uber on Saturday night was way too expensive, so I just walked through the rain to the nearest subway station and started the journey back to Bushwick. From the Morgan Av station it was a shorter walk to the Moore Hostel than from Flushing Av, but I still got completely soaked.

They had "Breaking Bad" on the TV in the hostel's common area, so I watched that for a while before turning in for the night.

Sunday, August 22, 2021

I woke up that morning and looked out the window to see the rain was still coming down. Not pouring in buckets like Saturday night, but it was a steady drizzle. That rain would continue every minute of the day. In fact just look at what my weather app was telling me that morning:

At least it never rained as hard on Sunday as it did on Saturday night. At least, not while I was there; I heard it got way worse at night as I was leaving and the World Trade Center even took a lightning bolt.

Back to the morning...I didn't want another greasy McD's breakfast again so I went back to the Starbucks, only to find that it was closed, even though their posted hours said it should be open. After looking around a bit I went into one of those independent hole-in-the-wall shops which was serving some great hot food. I think it was the Super Famous Deli on Flushing Avenue, right next to the Green Corner grocery store. I had a toasted bagel with cream cheese, a banana, and coffee.

Speaking of Green Corner, I went there to buy some groceries to take back to Maryland with me a little later when it was open. I was amazed to find they had Burro bananas! I really enjoy eating bananas which are not the standard yellow variety you find everywhere, and Burros are one of those. It's usually pretty tough to find non-standard bananas, I've typically only found them in niche "ethnic" grocery stores or, more rarely, in organic grocery stores. Green Corner was neither one of these things so I never expected to find any non-standard bananas there, much less Burros, which I had previously only ever found at the Central Market in San Antonio.

Among other things I also got some Familia Swiss Müsli and a bag of locally-roasted Brooklyn's Own coffee grounds. Apparently even after leaving Europe and moving back to the States, buying Müsli and coffee in a city I travel to is a habit that's sticking with me.

I had to check out of the hostel but they still let me store my bags there for the rest of the day, so I left my backpack and the grocery bag from Green Corner there while I went off in search of more to do. While walking in the direction of the Morgan Av subway station, I found a café I almost walked past. It was called Swallow Café. I almost went in but I saw a sign saying you need a vaccination card, so I had to go back to the hostel to reclaim mine from my backpack. I'm now keeping that thing with me at all times, because it increasingly seems to be my ticket to a normal life for now.

Swallow Café is a great example of what I'd grown to love about Brooklyn during the short time I stayed there: you never know what cool stuff you’ll find on any street you walk down. You may see nothing but blocks of old, drab brick buildings, but there's great hidden spots like this lurking within, just waiting to be discovered. I had a mocha, at first intending that to be the only thing I got there, but couldn't leave just yet after finishing it, so followed that with an Americano. Nice place.

I had a reservation for the American Museum of Natural History at 1:00 pm, and a space show at the adjoining Hayden Planetarium at 4:00 pm. With some time to kill I rode the subway east for a little while, then decided to turn around and make my way to the museum. But New York City is big...I was on the J or the Z, I think, and as it kept chugging westward through Brooklyn and I kept watching the time go by, past noon, I actually started to worry that I might miss my reservation time! I quickly changed trains somewhere, rode north on another one and emerged right next to the museum.

I finally made it to the museum in the nick of time. I didn't stop to check what time it was, I just walked as fast as I could out of the station. Apparently there's usually an entrance to the museum right there but it was closed now so I had to briefly step outside into the rain which was falling a little harder than in the morning. I turned a corner and easily saw the huge building that housed the American Museum of Natural History. There was a big staircase to go up to the doors. I just wanted to get in there in time for my reservation, so I didn't stop to take a picture of the impressive façade with its enormous pillars, or of the statue that quite a lot of people outside were looking at.

This huge dinosaur skeleton is the first thing you see when you enter.

This museum is enormous, taking up three floors, and it's all too easy to get lost in. There are so many huge "Halls," each devoted to a different theme. Some of them cover specific parts of the world and the history of their civilizations; the first hall I went through was about Africa, and then I also walked through others covering Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia. Soon I arrived at the Hall of Biodiversity...

In this room, all over the walls and hanging from the ceiling, are representations of all kinds of forms of life.

Most of us are never going to see a blue whale, so here's a model of one to scale.

In the middle of my visit, I had lunch at their food court. It's in the basement and it's self-serve cafeteria style.

Because this museum is so huge, it can take longer than you might think to get anywhere within, especially if you don't know your way around, most especially if you find everything so fascinating that you have to stop and look at everything you pass by. Time was running out before my space show started and there was no way to get through the whole museum before then.

I stopped for awhile in the Hall of Human Origins...

Reconstruction of a pair of Australopithecus afarensis, a species of human ancestors who lived in east Africa between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago, based on the fossils we've found in that area. They're somewhere around three to four feet tall. You may have heard of a fossil skeleton named "Lucy"; she was the first one discovered.

The "human family tree" consisting of skulls of every human ancestor species, starting with the earliest ones on the bottom and the more recent Homo species further up.

I like this one because it shows the familial resemblance between distantly related animals. From top to bottom: frog, human, chimpanzee, another human, some kind of bird, and finally a bat. Look closely: a bat's wing is really a short arm with a huge webbed hand, while a bird's wing--don't forget bats are mammals and not birds--is a long arm with short little vestigial finger bones fused together in the tip.

Next to the Hall of Human Origins is the Hayden Planetarium. I had a few minutes to look around before the space show started...

Pretty interesting. You can learn a great deal about planets, asteroids, moons, and such, and at a few of these you can stand on a scale and find out what you'd weigh if you were standing on the surface of one such body.

If you've seen the Hayden Planetarium from the outside, or even just a picture of it, you've probably seen this huge sphere. The bottom half of the sphere is a theater which plays a four-minute free show about the Big Bang, which I saw on my next trip two weeks later. The top half of it is the Star Theater where a state-of-the-art Zeiss projector displays the fantastic space shows for which this place is famous.

Today I'd be seeing the current space show, Worlds Beyond Earth, narrated by Lupita Nyong'o. This was quite a fantastic show to see. It was about the other planets in our solar system, with stunningly rendered representations of those worlds' surfaces, and most stunningly, accurate views of all the stars in the sky, thanks to the famous Zeiss projector.

On Wikipedia you can find a list of the various space shows that have been seen here over the years. On my and my family's visit here twenty years ago, we saw the very first show, Passport to the Universe narrated by Tom Hanks. Since then, today was my first time back, but I have seen the fifth show, Dark Universe narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium in Montréal. Worlds Beyond Earth, which I saw here on this visit, is the sixth show that has run in the planetarium.

After the show, it was time to leave. I felt like I'd been in a race against the clock all afternoon. Rushing to get to the museum on time, rushing through the museum to get to the space show, and now rushing from the museum back to the hostel to collect my stuff, which now included groceries, and from there to Penn Station to catch my train. Also, it was still pouring down rain outside, but thankfully I hardly had to be outside at all for this.

I did make it to Penn Station on time. But even then I felt rushed, because of how long it took to get through the vast underground maze that is Penn Station. Before I finally got to the Amtrak platforms I had to trudge past all the escalators leading to NJ Transit and Long Island Railroad tracks. But finally I reached the Amtrak section, which is under the new train hall they built...

The Moynihan Train Hall, built in the old Post Office headquarters, was planned but never implemented for decades. It was named for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator who had been pushing for years to get it built.

Right now there's not much in the train hall except ads for restaurants which all feature the words "Coming soon!" There is a Starbucks there, though, where I got another vanilla creme cold brew.

And so, that was the end of my first New York City trip this year. I left shortly after in the Acela Express which took me back to BWI. I had dinner and coffee on board; the dinner was a beef hot dog. Not bad, but it doesn't beat Deutsche Bahn's food. The rain only got worse, as anyone who lives in that region will remember. I think, shortly after my train left the city, the World Trade Center took a lightning bolt!

I left the city feeling like this was now my favorite American city, outranking Philadelphia which I'd felt that way about a week earlier. New York didn't just feel like a big city but almost like a country of its own; not just because of how unique it is but because of all the cultural diversity within it. I would be back in town two weeks for much longer, and that experience would really cement my feelings about New York City.