Lower Manhattan

I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya. Sorry. Just been very very busy since getting back to Sydney with a backlog of work, plus class teaching, council representing, friends drinking, and so on. When I finally got a chance to put somethign up on Tuesday, Blogger refused to let me upload photos. You forgive me, I know. More to come with the weekend. I hope.

We spent a fine day in the Financial District. Actually it was less impressive than I expected. This is Wall Street, made famous by Oliver Stone's film 'Wall Street'. Wall Street is really a small street. For that matter, Broad Street is really rather narrow. The whole area is not so very different from downtown Sydney or Auckland.

Except for the automatic weapons. To be fair, New York as a whole is much less paranoid than Sydney. You can even find rubbish bins in the subway stations, even at the risk that someone might chuck out a dirty bomb or something. You cannot do this in Sydney. But unfortunately you can't tour the stock exchange (this building) anymore. Nor can you visit the Federal Reserve museum without ringing ahead. Such a disappointment for me, you can imagine, but Raych was secretly pleased.

We don't know who this guy is or what he was talking about, but it represents all the many times we ran into news crews in this city. The day before, walking around just south of SoHo (ie, in SoSoHo), we skirted a fully-fledged media circus outside the court buildings. Watching Fox 5 later, it was either about a gathering of September 11 family members, or the previous night's SoHo murder of a young criminology student, for which a bouncer had been arrested.

This is that statue from 'Ghostbusters II'. The one that walks around at the end.

And this is a giant hole in the ground in the middle of Lower Manhattan. It's from some movie whose name I can't recall. It was a foreign film. Low production values, but spectacular special effects.

A lot of people still visit the set.

They built this all-American shrine.