New York City: Day's Three & Four

While I would love to start off this post with a picture, my laptop has broken, and may be lost to us forever, thus I will direct you to my Flickr page were you can see all the NY pics we've taken so far (barring today, as today is the occurrence of the tragedy of coming back to the hotel to a broken laptop). The URL is http://www.flickr.com/bcrawfo and it should show you everything you need to see.

So today we went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island! Woo! We started of the morning by wandering around Battery Park looking for something resembling anything and were sorely disappointed. After much wandering and asking around, we came upon Castle Clinton, an old fort built on the coast to protect the New York harbor around the time of the War of 1812. There was one little kiosk in the fort's courtyard, and a line of 500 people waiting to get tickets, one. ticket. at. a. time. So needless to say that blew. Well, much relieved were we to leave that line and find that the line for people who actually have tickets started at the docks, wound through Battery Park, around the backside, around two statues, three street vendors, a guy playing the steel drum, a guy playing a violin, two cop cars, and an ambulance before finally reaching the end of the eponymous Mother of All Lines (to reach, as Ethan put it, The Mother of Us All - the Statue of Liberty. Quite poetic fellow).

Well, needless to say, we made it onto the boat, went over to Liberty Island, and walked around looking up and listening to the audio tour (which we both agreed to each other, on quite a consistent basis, that we could not possibly hear each other because of) and took pictures from the ground, because we weren't allowed to go up, reason unknown. Very cool, and good to see.

Then we ferried over to Ellis Island which is also very cool. We took pictures of the metal slab that has my grandfather's name etched on it, and toured the whole building, and read a bunch of very interesting facts, and saw so many pictures, and artifacts, and all kinds of stuff. There's the Registry Hall, which was the main deal where people were registered and inspected for noxious and unclean diseases (something Ethan kept insisting either I or [my] mom had - actually he just kept saying your mom all day, which is all Heather's fault because her comment is the funniest damn thing ever) and was basically intact, with just minor restoration and some cleaning. Very cool again.

From there we walked around Wall St., saw the NYSE, Federal Hall (first Capitol of the US), went into the Trump Building for two seconds, saw the JP Morgan building which he deliberately built four stories tall, though he knew he could build bigger, just didn't need to (or was feeling snooty about it or something :)). Then we subwayed into Little Italy which actually was very Italian all over, though it neighbors Little China, and that one's starting to take over. But Little Italy perseveres. Apparently the heart of LI is Mulberry St., so we found a nice looking restaurant on Mulberry and I regaled Ethan with tales of how my paisons were going to take care of him during dinner and he should just fuggetaboutit. He had no idea of my connections.

And lastly, we subwayed over to the West Village, which is West of Greenwich Village, and went to a jazz bar a nice guy at the restaurant had been telling us about. We ended up playing chess, drinking a couple beers, and jamming to some really fun live jazz music. Let the record show, that I vanquished Ethan in chess by a record of 3-2-1, the 1 being a tie. Basically I'm the best chess player alive.