Lower Manhattan and global warming

Last night was hot. At 9.00 p.m., after 36 hours, we finally get to sleep again. Simon stops after a scooter meeting in the middle of a motorway with no emergency lane on a bridge in the rain at 2.00am. Luckily he survived. I cough my way through the night.

Anyone who claims that the Americans aren’t doing anything about global warming is a liar. Some examples? For example, the shower here only has hot/cold, not a little/much. If you take a cold shower, you make the earth cold faster. Or: you walk along Broadway, close to a house wall. Cold drops are constantly coming from the external air conditioning units further up.
The most positive thing I notice are the supermarkets. It’s 5 degrees cooler in front of each one :-)

I explored Lower Manhattan today. Took the subway from Brooklyn to Union Square, then walked down 14th. Little Puerto Rico. Extra pimpy monster trucks with bass like you’re standing right above the subway. Then cross-country to Chinatown. No wonder only Chinese people live there. They are small, light and slim. Americans would simply get stuck in some of the narrow alleyways. All of a sudden I’m in Little Italy. No transition. One street further and a completely different country.

There’s nothing to see at the World Trade Centre apart from a huge building site. The NY Port Authority seems to be very keen to keep its dollar sheep dry. Any bets that the Memorial Site will be made even smaller than planned? That’s why I didn’t feel like sending a dollar to the ground as a paper aeroplane. All you can see are a few very hidden, demolished remains of the wall. That’s all.

On to Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan. There the ferry leaves for Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, the queue in front of the ticket office is 50 metres long and the queue in front of the ferry is half as long as the walk to Liberty Island. So I save myself the trouble and have a good laugh at the looks on the faces of some Amish people watching the breakdancers.

On the way back, I check out American electronic music prices. I don’t know who said it was all so much cheaper. Ok, web designers probably know good prices back home. But apart from MP3 players and CDs, everything I’ve found is much more expensive: digicams, headsets, SD cards, TVs, computers. And I think MP3 players are only cheaper because every third person here walks around with earbuds in their ears. Volume discount.

Unfortunately, I have to give up my diabolical plan to test all the US fast food chains and become a millionaire with one guide after the first test at Wendy’s. The millions are of no use to me dead. It was definitely the most disgusting burger of all time. If Supersize me had been filmed here, it would definitely have been a short film.

Broadway. Everyone is scurrying around like crazy. Yellow, black, brown, white. The hustle and bustle calms me down. After seeing one-legged 80-year-olds crossing the road on red all day, I don’t give a damn. The honking was very loud, as if they didn’t want to let the village lad get away with it.

Union Square. A bit like Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, but bigger, louder, louder, fuller. Capoeira. A “Free Palestine” demo and its aggressive opponents. Someone hands me a flyer with about 1753 reasons why Bush should be ousted before 2008. They compare him to Hitler. And poof, I grin and feel a bit at home. Two deaf-mutes next to me are gesticulating wildly. One of them, a real brawler weighing 100kg with upper arms thicker than my thighs, is wearing a pink shirt: Only tough guys wear pink.

I drive home to Simon in Brooklyn. Dinner, a green curry that is absolutely indigestible even for a spicy eater like me – even after the first spoonful. I give up after the twentieth. Simon has a visitor, some friends from Montreal, scooter freaks. They are organising rallies all weekend with up to 300 participants. At the end of the previous night in a park, among other places. There they were apparently stopped quite rudely by the police.

This evening is just a concert in a strip club in the Financial District. Lots of freaks, weird rollers, tits downstairs, dirty rock upstairs. Despite $5 a fart beer, I drink a few more than necessary – then you have to go to the loo more often, and that’s downstairs :-) Around two o’clock I head home through the night. At home, a 150kg guy with a ventilator sleeps next to me. I guess he can’t do without it any more. I feel sorry for his scooter.