Seriously, the sidewalks in New York are really busy, don’t walk backwards unless you’re one of two people carrying a large unwieldy object. I can’t count how many times I’m walking down the sidewalk and I see someone backing up into me like they’re the only person in the entire world. I always want to yell this at them.
Since it’s warming up that means more tourists. I saw two groups yesterday in Chinatown. Actually I’m on sure that this one was a tourist group. Usually when you have a large mass of white people in Chinatown there’re few other things they could be. I found this woman with the rainbow baton thing rather amusing. The other group I saw was crowding the entrance to the subway turnstiles at the Northwest corner of Canal and Lafayette. That one always gets really crowded because there’re only two turnstiles and they’re the vertical kind where everyone suddenly forgets how to swipe a magnetic strip. Either they wait until the previous person’s “Go” display disappears before swiping or they’re just totally inept to begin with. I hate that entrance with a fiery passion on weekens, but thankfully I almost never have to enter there. I imagine with a crowd like that it’d be faster to go back up to the street to a different entrance and go in there.
A friend recently told me this thing she heard “People from Los Angeles are mean but they pretend to be nice, and people from New York are nice but they pretend to be mean.” This is one of the funniest things I’ve heard in recent memory and is now one of my new favorite quotes. Wish I had been clever enough to think up that one.
This is an easy way to figure out who are the tourists. Generally though you’ll only see it this exaggerated on weekends when there are a lot of them in the city, especially midtown. I was around Rockerfeller Center this last weekend and I was the only one crossing for a few seconds even though the street was clear. There were quite a few people waiting it out and then crossed. I’m not quite as hardcore as some of the other New Yorkers out there. Most people wait in the street instead of on the curb, but the ones who kind of scare me are the ones who cross so close to the cars that it almost looks like the back tires are going to run over their toes. I stay further back than that because it freaks me out.
I wish I could claim to be the one who figured this out but I don’t drive so the likelihood of me knowing this firsthand is slim to none. A person in my kung fu class who has been in New York for a very long time mentioned this off hand during a conversation so I wrote it down. They said with confidence that this is the only place where you can turn right on red in New York City, but if anyone knows otherwise please let me know.
Oftentimes I think that this city needs some REAL tourist traps (pun intended). The one I think about most frequently is the time released one where if a person lingers too long outside the exit of a subway station (usually staircases) that something would either swallow them up, or maybe give them a good electric shock so they’d move out of the freakin’ way for the people behind them. For the purposes of this strip though, anvils are just funnier.
Obviously I’m not dumb enough to not know the reason that the Statue of Liberty’s interior has been off limits for the past five years. Despite all the security measures they take getting to the Statue they’re not going to give anyone a chance to cause it any harm. Really of course, it’s just they wouldn’t want people inside the Statue should it come under attack. Though the Statue itself doesn’t strike me as the easiest thing to evacuate even for a lesser emergency. So it’s kind of amusing because it just makes you think they didn’t care about anyone who went into the statue before 2001.
I’ve seen this happen so many times either to me or some other guy on the street. Basically you have someone who doesn’t realize that if you walk far enough in one direction without looking where you’re going (especially in New York) you’re going to bump into someone. Perhaps it’s a hot girl they see and don’t want to stop seeing or a fight that’s happening on the street. I don’t know, but it’s never not annoying (when it happens to me) or not amusing (when it happens to someone else and you see it coming from a block away).
Recently I decided to suck up my New Yorker pride and go do some touristy stuff I always wanted to do. I had been waiting for someone from out of town so I could use them as an excuse to do touristy stuff. I’ve already seen a lot of New York landmarks just from being to different parts of the city, but I still haven’t been to the the Statue of Liberty, top of the Empire State Building or the boat tour around Manhattan. So this week I decided to do all of those. I draw the line at the bus tour though because who wants to go on a tour that gets stuck in traffic with people honking their horns like crazy, not my idea of relaxing fun.
The Statue of Liberty’s interior is still closed like it has been since 9/11 which is a shame because after all the kung fu classes it’d be fun to go up the stairs as fast as possible. Actually not as fast as possible, but just generally fast because going as fast as possible is ridiculous especially considering how hot it probably is inside there.
Believe it or not this place is 100% real. I briefly considered using it for a weekend photo comic, but then I realized I don’t want to advertise a gun store. Supposedly they only sell equipment to police, but the “Tourist welcome” sign is what really got me.
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