Upde Designs

Happy Wednesday!

The experience continues.  I have 10 images for you today.  If you are on Facebook you can click here to go to my blog.  Also remember you can click on any image to make it larger and show more detail.

I apologize first for the quality of some of the images.  It was like I had a point and shoot camera.  I was trying to capture everything I saw and paid no attention to the lighting conditions, f-stop or shutter speed.  Bear with me as the story unfolds the images get better.  🙂

We landed at New York’s La Guardia Airport around Noon EDT.  From there we took a $57 taxi that had no air conditioning, no shocks, and had the “check engine” light on.  After all that we finally got to our hotel and checked in without incident.

First order of business (in my view) was to hit the street and find somewhere to eat.  We ended up at a Hard Rock cafe and had a great meal.  Our waitress was super friendly and helpful. The restaurant was air-conditioned, which helped and they had wine, which helped even more. 🙂

To say that I was overwhelmed and experiencing sensory overload is an understatement.  I lost all sense of direction and by the end of the trip I could pretty much figure out if I wanted to go one way the correct way was 180 degrees the other way.  Thank God, Jeanne didn’t lose hers.

The only thing on our agenda this day was a 6:00 p.m. carriage ride through Central Park that we had booked on-line.  So we decided to walk up or down Broadway and see some of the sights.  There were certainly some sights to see.  🙂

Batman and the Penguin were the first celebrities we ran into.  There was a seven-foot tall walking statute of liberty, Spider Man, the Naked Cow Girl, and much more.  Apparently they will have their photograph taken with you for a fee.  We passed.

My first impressions of Times Square was that it is packed with people walking.  We always seemed to be in the wrong lane going against the flow.  There are signs that suggest foot traffic direction but few people paid attention to them.

Most people I saw had their eyes in their cell phone and they just walked.  You could tell the tourists from the natives because we were all gawking at the sights and the New Yorker’s were just looking at stuff on their phone.

There is the ugly side of the city as well.  Homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk with their entire worldly possessions in a garbage bag.  There were other people like this lady looking for handouts.  We saw a lot of strange things but for the most part it was all amazing.

We saw a lot of police presence on the streets as well as this traffic cop.  We heard sirens all the time and traffic was so heavy that the sirens and red lights did little good to clear the way.  It was comforting to know that for every police officer we saw there were probably two or three more undercover officers around.

Drivers show their frustration by long horn blasts and there was a lot of that.  I never heard more honking horns in my life.  For me one of the most annoying things was the street hawks.  They are trying to sell anything and everything.  Boat rides, bus rides, bike rides, carriage rides, jewelry, and a lot of other stuff.  The stores have hawkers outside trying to get you to come inside to buy stuff.

We walked by this group of media people who were doing a photo / video shoot.  I couldn’t get close enough to hear what was going on but there were a lot of suits standing around so some big business news event I guess.

We even saw Donald Trump walking the street giving everyone the thumbs up and yelling make American great again.  I have some later images of him (he was on the street every day) and he looks a lot like our President.

I’ll finish today’s edition of the blog with this image of a tall building.  Nothing special about the building and there are so many of them on Manhattan but I liked the way it looked.

More to come…

Enjoy your day and be careful.