Times Square

It was very cold the temperature, we had to walk a bit to reach the crowded times square, the temperature was -5degrees centigrade, luckily for us we had our gloves and capes to protect us from the wind chill. My nose was pale white devoid of blood, I had started feeling numb on my ears and nose, my nose was dripping with water, it was that cold.

We reached the intersection that was very heavily illuminated.Times Square has achieved the status of an iconic world landmark and has become a symbol of its home city. Times Square is principally defined by its lighted and animated advertisements.
Times Square consists of the blocks between Sixth and Ninth Avenues from east to west, and West 39th and West 52nd Streets from south to north (40.75659° N 73.98626° W), making up the western part of the commercial area of Midtown Manhattan.

The theaters of Broadway and the huge number of animated neon and television-style signage have long made it one of New York’s iconic images, and a symbol of the intensely urban aspects of Manhattan. Times Square is the only neighborhood with a zoning ordinance requiring tenants to display bright signs. The density of illuminated signs in Times Square now rivals that of Las Vegas. Officially, signs in Times Square are called “spectaculars.”

I spent some time relishing the flourescent lighting and the aura of the square before heading for the PATH to take me back to New Jersey

The next day we spent visitng the malls of New Jersey and then headed back for Virginia, it was a long drive back and I was tired,as i hadnt slept well since we had started this journey.

 

Y! music to rescue

Yeah!!! take you to the candy shop !!

A long hard day at work, a bruised brain, shallow feelings and a broken spirit, I got back to the hotel with nothing to do, didnt want to go to Chipotle to get grub cause wasn’t feeling up to the mark, needed something exciting, so i just wanted to get into my sneakers and my run off to the basket ball court at YMCA to shoot some hoops.

After a good hour long session of unsuccessful tries at the hoop, i decided that it was time to call it a day, so i walked back to my hotel, it was alredy 8:30Pm and i still wasnt feeling too good, perhpas, i needed to take a break, so i decided that i would call it a day and sleep early.

Its 11:00Pm and I’m writing this.. so what did I do all this while. Im listening to Y! music and its tuned to My station. I have been customizing my station since the last 3 years and have become very familiar with the Geico advertisement, now it makes sense to me after i saw the AD in the TV. The good thing about working with my station for the past 3 years is that it plays all my favourite songs, what a relief, i had totally forgotton that Y! music existed.

Oh the 8:30 to 11:00 history. I took a trip to K-Mart at Herndon and Target. Got some Gel. Talked to folks and friends. Ate some stale food from the fridge..

Cheers to Y! music i feel better now

 

Charging Bull

Charging Bull (sometimes called the Wall Street Bull or the Bowling Green Bull) is a 3,200kg (7,000 pound) bronze sculpture by Arturo Di Modica that sits in Bowling Green park near Wall Street in New York City.

The sculpture depicts a bull, the symbol of aggressive financial optimism and prosperity, leaning back on its haunches and with its head lowered as if ready to charge.

Di Modica reportedly created the sculpture following the 1987 stock market crash as a testament to his belief in the unceasing vitality of American capitalism. The sculpture, however, was not commissioned by the city as a work of public art. Rather, Di Modica created it on his own (at a personal cost of some US$360,000) and installed it in December 1989 as “guerrilla art“, trucking it to Lower Manhattan and placing it in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a Christmas gift to the people of New York .

The police seized the illegal sculpture and placed it into an impound lot. In response to the public outcry favoring the sculpture, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation re-installed it several blocks away to its current location in the plaza at Bowling Green where it faces up Broadway.

The sculpture is one of the most photographed pieces of art in the city and has become a popular tourist destination for visitors to the Financial District. It has also come to be an unofficial symbol of the Financial District itself, and it often appears in the local news media to punctuate stories about optimism in the financial market

The bull stood there in all its fierce glory.

 

Ground Zero

We got offf the ferry at Battery park. It is a 90 acre (0.4 km²) planned community at the southwestern tip of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The land upon which it stands was created from the Hudson River using 1.2 million cubic yards (917,000 cubic meters) of dirt and rocks excavated during the construction of the World Trade Center and certain other construction projects. The neighborhood, which is the site of the World Financial Center along with numerous housing, commercial and retail buildings, is named for adjacent Battery Park.

We walked across the park to Ground Zero where were expecting the remains of the 9/11 massacare, as we waded across the streets to the WTC we came across a huge construction site. This was the place where the September 11, 2001 attacks took place and consisted of a series of coordinated terrorist suicide attacks by Islamic extremists on the United States on September 11, 2001. The victims were predominantly civilians.

Today this place is buzzing with construction activity, in an effort to recreate the glory of the two towers that were demolished in the attacks. The World Financial Center aligns its self along with one of the sides of Ground Zero, most of the companies have shifted to the world financial center.Designed by César Pelli, with Adamson Associates, the complex was built by Olympia and York between 1985 and 1988 on landfill used to build Battery Park City. The fill material came from dirt excavated during the building of the World Trade Center, as well as garbage, dirt and debris.

Portions of the complex, especially the Winter Garden, were severely damaged in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but has since been reopened after significant repairs.

This is how ground zero looks today

Next stop the raging bull

 

Liberty Island – Statue Of Liberty

Statue of Liberty (Statue de la Liberté), is a colossal statue given to the United States by the Paris based Union Franco-Américaine (Franco-American Union) in 1886, standing at Liberty Island, in the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor as a welcome to all visitors, immigrants, and returning Americans. The copper statue, dedicated on October 28, 1886, commemorates the centennial of the United States and is a gesture of friendship between the two nations. The sculptor was Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower, engineered the internal structure. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was responsible for the choice of copper in the statue’s construction and adoption of the Repoussé technique.

We reached Liberty Island, the Statue was beautiful and could be seen clearly from Ellis Island. Statue of liberty stood gracefully in the maiden green robe, the green color can be attributed to the copper that got platinated with Green coating due to oxygen and air reacting with the metal. The Green color looks hazy in areas on the Statue.

There is a musuem that shows how the statue was built, its structure and compostion and various artifacts. The statue looked beautiful in the gleaming sun. I was amazed at the height of the huge structure.

 

 

Ellis Island

We decided that we would start for New York early in the morning, We decided that we would leave the car in New Jersey and go to New York either by the PATH or by the Ferry. We decided that the later was a good choice as it would cover Ellis lsland, Liberty island and then we would finally reach Battery Park.

We got tickets for the Ferry for $11.55 and boarded the ferry, it was very cold so we were wrapped up with mufflers, capes, and gloves, i had my camera all geared up. The ferry shuttles between Ellis Island, and Jersey Harbour. The tickets came with complementary tickets to visit the Liberty island. That was a good bargain, perhaps because it was off season we were given the tickets to the Liberty Island Pedestal.

Ellis Island was our first stop. Ellis Island was no more than a lot of sand in the Hudson River, located just south of Manhattan, in the 17th century. Ellis Island was selected to be the new immigration processing center to facilitate the large number of immigrants coming to America. In 1892, Ellis Island opened and for the next fifty years more than twelve million people came through the island on their way into the United States.

There is a museum on the island that shows the statistics of immigration in the US.We then boarded the ferry to liberty island. The home of the Statue of Liberty.

 

To New Jersey

9th Feb 2007

New York is around 350 miles and the drive takes around 5 hours. So we decided that we would stop at New Jersey. Since we just had two days we decided that we would start off for New Jersey from Virginia on Friday. We left work early, Nanda had his Hyundai Sonata all set for the journey, we burned a few Hindi songs on a CD that would last us the journey. Set with all the maps taken from google we left Virginia at 5:15PM.

The journey was long and we took breaks in between, we lost our way a couple of times, the problem is that if you align your self to a wrong exit then you have to take the exit, somehow we managed to take a wrong exit and found our selves in the wrong highway. Anyways Nanda managed to find the way back to the correct highway, that was really good driving, i definately could not have managed that had i been driving, we had to pay an extra toll because of getting lost.

We reached Jersey City sometime around 1130PM, and since we didnt have a GPS, we got lost again in the city, luckily for us Nanda’s friend helped us to get to his place.

New Jersey is a small city and it resembles Karol Bagh, small roads, cars parked neatly on the road, most of the roads are one way so you have to be careful driving in the city, there are lost of indians around in the city.We spent the night at a friends place, luckily we had stashed out comforters in Nanda’s car, they were a real help. We planned the trip for the next day, Nanda took care of the details because he was the best person for the job.

New York is connected to New Jersey by the PATH.The Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH) is a rapid transit railroad linking Manhattan, New York with New Jersey, and providing service to Jersey City, Hoboken, Harrison, and Newark. It is operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. While some PATH stations are adjacent to New York City Subway, Newark City Subway and Hudson-Bergen Light Rail stations, there are no free transfers as the four systems operate independently. PATH is also one of the few 24-hour operating rapid transit systems in the world.

PATH spans 13.8 miles (22.2 km) of route mileage, not including any route overlap.
The PATH is very musch simillar to the METRO coming up in Delhi except that the METRO is far more advanced and well managed than the PATH. Perhpas this is because the PATH has been operating for years while METRO has been operating since the past 5 years

 

My Canon powershot A630

After looking out at a number of shops and websited I finally decided to buy my self a Canon A630 Powershot. The camera has been voted as a very good choice in terms of picture quality and ease of use, though it has a lot of manual controls. My main aim was to get the camera befor my trip to New York.

So finally got the camera and im ready for my NY trip, which should happen sometime on the weekend

 

To the beach….Rohoboth beach !!

2nd Feb 2007
Plans come up very quickly here and i could not call them plans, it would be better to call them instantaneous decisions. So on the evening of Friday 1st Feb, we decided that we needed to go out somewhere. Over the past few days I have kept my collegue Nanda busy. He’s been taking me out to places in Virginia, we’ve been trying various restaurants here in Virginia. Nanda has recently joined the DC office , so he’s new as well to this place though he’s been in the US for the past 4 years.

So we decided that we should go to some place that has a water body… what’s better than visiting the beach so we decided that we would try Chesapeake bay, or some other place close by. Finally we deicided to hit the beach at Rohoboth.

Rohoboth lies on the Atlantic Coast only three hours from Virginia. Its approximately 142 miles from our place. All plans set we decided to take the trip on saturday early morining. Plans were to start by 6:00AM in the morning. 8:00AM and we still hadn’t heard anything from anyone… were we going ?

Somehow i managed to drag my self out of bed to see why Nanda hadn’t given me the wake up call. I was furious. Nanda seemed to be sleeping away to glory, anyways after an exchange of slangs we decided we could stil make it. So we started off finally for Rohoboth Beach.

We passed George town, I remember hearing about George town. Its a small country side village and has a majority of black population. Its was beautiful. Small houses, huge trucks, corner stores, small roads. Too picturesque and hard to describe. Words would be less, a picture would be perfect.

Rohoboth is small though bigger than George Town. We managed to reach noon. Devoid of humanity this beach lay molested by the cold atlantic waves. Few people could be seen taking their dogs for a stroll. It was cold, perhaps the wrong time to visit the beach, nevertheless the altantic ocean lapping the beach was a different sight all together.

Though i wasn’t able to hit the beach as i would have liked, the whole trip was worth the visit.

 

Bloody cold here !!

While going to office it was so cold that the caps and mufflers were of no use, it felt that the wind had just slapped me, my cheeks and nose red, I felt senseless, painless.

The wind chill factor is -3. I dont know what that means. Alarms have been sounded asking people to avoid going out because of the chill. Ponds have alredy frozen. The temperature is -14degrees. I have never witnessed such cold. Its impossible to roam on the streets because of the chill.