When I get stressed, my mouth goes dry. I noticed that on a weekend tour of New York I took with a group of 50 people whom I hooked up with through the People Over 50 Meetup. It was all a bit overwhelming. I made the mistake of entering the Times Square area, where there's now street repairs going on, forcing people into an even tighter squeeze than usual. I ended up not going to any shows but returning to the hotel early.
We left Friday morning and were on the bus almost around the clock. There were about six women for every man. The most scenic part of the drive was in New York State southeast of Syracuse, in James Fenimore Cooper country. We stayed at the Empire Meadowlands hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey. I was in a room with Peter, who'd coincidentally been sitting next to me on the bus. I heard that the rooms on the eastern side had a view of Manhattan, but we were on the west. He and I and a woman whose name I've forgotten (I warned her I was terrible at remembering names!) had dinner at a Japanese buffet in Secaucus. On both Saturday and Sunday I took a New Jersey transit bus back to the hotel, which was an adventure in itself. (Route 129 can drop you off just around the corner from the hotel!) At the hotel breakfast I ate yogurt for the first time in years. It isn't that I didn't like yogurt but that I'd just lost interest in it.
Saturday we took on a tour guide and drove around Manhattan. He was talking about a public dance Friday nights at the Lincoln Centre Plaza (A Midsummer Night's Swing) and said, "Young men and women come together to spawn." Classic New Yorkese! We got behind schedule because of heavy traffic and only got a short time at the 9/11 Memorial Park, but no complaints from me about that. We ate at an upmarket food court in Rockefeller Center, where I had a lobster roll that was a lot pricier than back home. In the afternoon we did a walking tour of Central Park, where we saw a crowd of people staring at their iPads, playing Pokemon Go! I had dinner at Carnegie Deli: a corned beef and egg sandwich so huge that I ended up skipping dinner on Sunday. American food can make me feel unclean.
On Sunday morning it was raining sore. (Thank goodness I took my raincoat!) In the morning we visited Ellis Island but didn't get to stay there long. I could have stayed with the main group, had lunch at Chelsea Market and walked through the High Line Park, but like a couple of others I let the bus take me on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My lunch was a hot dog--a New York dog, with sauerkraut as well as relish--which I ate outside the Shakespeare in the Park theatre, where they were performing Troilus and Cressida with snatches of heavy metal music. My favourite part of the Met is the American Wing, but I went through some other areas and saw stuff like a 17th-century French painting where a young woman asks an old gypsy for her fortune as her entourage picks her pockets! And there was this bust of the young Roman emperor Caracalla, with an unimperial perplexed expression like Hamlet.
One of the group went home by train, so on the way back the bus had one empty seat, and guess who got extra space to stretch? (I was born lucky!) I was talking to a very friendly Italian-Canadian called Pena, who'll now hook up with me on Facebook. As I took the TTC home I saw Toronto in a new way, since my extra alertness wasn't relaxed.
I'm not really one for group tours. Next time I'll go to NYC alone, stay for a week and try to do things a bit more slowly. It's the seventh time I've visited that city, but I always feel like I've only scratched the surface. Great cities are fine for visiting, especially London, which I lived in for eight months so I got below the surface a bit. But it's better to live in a near-great city like Toronto!
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