A little update

Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn.

Just thought I'd kill some time while the girlfriend does some retail therapy. My primary job is to look up from time to time and give the yes or no about a certain piece of clothing/shoe. Most of the time she disagrees with my opinion regarding fashion anyway, so I'm not to sure why she even asks...

I'm not one to self-inflict major financial damage via retail. In fact, I'm actually shocked by the level of consumerism in this city that seems to take hold of normal people and turn them into soulless demons. Demons whom are willing to claw each others' eyes out just to get that last size twelve, purple cashmere cardigan. Lets face it, sales in NZ and sales in the USA are from different dimensions. This leads me to wonder how many people get trodden to death during the Christmas shopping season.. However, I do tend to forget about my apparent disdain towards excessive material consumption when it comes to basketball apparel (Nike and Jordan being the main culprits). I've promised myself to be sensible, but at the same time it's almost a shame if I were not to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate.......hey, at least I'm not into high-end fashion where the packaging alone costs the equivalent of feeding the whole developing world.

In the end, I know my main purpose here was wasn't to shop. The day was balanced with a nice visit over the East River (which isn't really a river at all) where we spent a couple of hours at a Brooklyn food market. I like my bacon butties from the Dunedin farmers' market, but the selection at this place was incredible. Everything from homebrewed beer, asian style hotdogs, to tacos was on offer. This is the kind of thing a 'real' New Yorker would enjoy. Truly in a NY state of mind...assuming stuffing yourself silly with delicious morsels of food qualifies.

Hotdog with spring onions and charsiu...identity crisis, much?

Where's that Footlocker..?

A quick ride back over the East River landed us on 34th street. A little stroll down this road lead us to a little building called the Empire State Building. Not bad. I highly recommend anyone thinking of visiting this place to hire the optional audio tour guide. The experience is made that much better when an old Jewish(he sounds like Woody Allen, although he might be Italian..) NY'er describes the greatness of this building, and the greatness of NY city in general. Nothing much needs to be said about this iconic landmark, but below are a couple of photos to give you an idea about how awesome the visit was.

Random facts: In those days, there weren't many safety regulations so they were essentially constructing this building at a rate of one floor a day(!). Based on past occurences, they were expecting one worker to die for each floor, therefore approximately 100 people should have died. In fact, only FIVE people died during the construction(officially), with only two falling off and one guy getting his head knocked off when he looked up the elevator shaft (you get the idea).

Various views of and from the Empire State Building.

The floor area surrounding me is cluttered with shoes. It really does look a warzone. I've been sitting at this chair typing this blog on my phone for a while now. The people that walk by changes constantly, but they all have the same goal: get as much shit as their credit allows. The girlfriend still isn't back (we're in the shoe section of Macy's, the biggest department store in the world. 'Nuff said), so I'll have a quick nap amidst all this chaos...

D

These buskers in the subway were good. Especially the singer. The guy with the keyboard was singing, not the flute player. Singing while playing the flute at the same time would be crazy shit.