How Sweet It Is

Distance Traveled:   60,170 kms (BNE-MEL-SYD-BKK-PKT-BKK-CNX-BKK-PP-SR-BB-PP-HCMC-NC-TH-HA-H-L-MR-AG-SV-TF-AC-LL-ML-CZ-TF-CZ-SV-L-BP-ZG-SP-LJ-VN-PG-SZ-MN-ZR-GV-ML-FC-RM-FG-MN-VC-CT-RM-PDX-NYC-DC-PH-NYC-HP)

Time Difference: -14 hours (from Brisbane)

Soundtrack: Loads of barbershop, Them Crooked Vultures, Eva Cassidy, Burt Bacharach, Soundtrack of Jersey Boys

Currently Inspired by: Emily Warren Roebling

Stacks: A carelessly banged head - pride rather than flesh wound
Words written: 96,080.

So, when I sent out my last blog after a three week hiatus I promised not to have another break before the end of my trip and then on Tuesday I went “ahhh crap”.  I plum forgot to do one again last Sunday!  This is what happens when one breaks one’s routine.  I’m sure you all don’t care, but I feel bad for not doing what I said I would.

Taylor Swift and Conor Kennedy (not mine)

I’m in Cape Cod at the moment in a little town called Yarmouth, visiting with one of the Driscoll “cousins” met over the years at our clan gathering in Ireland.  We’ve not seen each other for years, so the meeting was merry, made even more so by my pure joy at being somewhere clean and green, with ocean nearby.  On my first night we visited the town of Hyannis, which is where Taylor Swift is currently residing according to the gossip mags that have her hooked up with one of the young Kennedys, America’s royal family.  They live on a compound here and even though I wouldn’t recognise one if they asked me to afternoon tea and a game of badminton, I’ve nonetheless been keeping a lookout for any fanfare.  Sadly, there is none to be seen.  It would seem that my celebrity spotting luck ran out on my fourth day in New York.  I haven’t even seen a reality show star since (as far as I’m aware).  So much for all of my stalking plans.  I shall have to return the night vision goggles for a refund.  

Marconi Beach (still not one of mine)

Yesterday we hit a huge national beach by the name of Marconi, which stretched further than I was able to see in either direction.  High sand bluffs separated it from the carpark and despite the swathes of people sunning themselves upon the golden sand it had an eerie, edge-of-the-world feeling about it.  The water was freezing.  Too cold for me to brave any higher than my calves I’m afraid, but I was simply so blissed out to be away from the city and out in nature I couldn’t really have cared less. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have been keeping me company with their adventures. I read Kafka in Prague and Shakespeare in the UK so I figured I should finally get around to reading Twain, as I'm in the US.  He says nigger a lot.  My understanding is he was kind of satirising society back then but still... he says nigger.  A lot. *squirms*

Provincetown (Also not my photo!)

After the beach we visited a little village by the name of Provincetown for a stroll and dinner.  A cuter place is rarely seen.  Although a lot of it is quite contrived and kitsch (think Byron Bay: started off cool and hippy, turned into lots of expensive tiny little stores and tourist traps)  there was some genuine Ye Olde type architecture still around and also a smattering of sweet and homemade icecream stores still in existence which were a pleasure to see (and eat at).  Fresh saltwater taffy is to die for, and is also seriously addictive.  I bought four pieces as we were walking down the main street and in about five minutes and with a few less fillings in my teeth I was like “OK. Right.  I need more taffy”.  It’s like crack.  A large bag of it was duly purchased on the way back (taffy, not crack), but I am sorely concerned about its lasting capabilities.  The white paper bag has gone from being crisp and pristine to sadly deflated and crumpled around the edges with the constant raiding, but still looks oh so tempting.  I can hear it rustling now “Natalieeeeeeeeeeee… come and eat more of meeeee *rustle rustle*”.  NO, bag.  I’m writing my blog.  Sheesh.

Magnolia buttercream cupcakes

I don’t know what they put in their desserts here but my whole life I’ve had a savoury tooth over a sweet one, and now I get cranky if I don’t get my daily fix of cupcakes / icecream / candy, and I’m not happy about it.  Imagine developing a sweet tooth at this age!  The sugar makes it difficult to lose weight and I detest being a slave to addictions, as my not-so-dearly departed nicotine habit would gladly testify.  This morning I resolved, once my taffy is gone, to work out a way to cast off the sugar addiction that has crept up on me here.  If anyone has any suggestions apart from just “stop eating sugar”, like tips to ease the process or help the cravings, then please send them through.  It doesn't help that I now know where Magnolia Bakery is.  Two of them, in fact.  And a self serve soft frozen yoghurt place.

BUNNIES!!!  There are bunnies everywhere here.  Literally. Just hopping along the road, or munching away in the gardens.  I feel like I’ve shrunk and fallen into one of those little mail order ceramic villages where all the kids wear stripy pants and suspenders and the old men have pipes, whiskers and pink cheeks.  Here there is street after street of tiny little clapboard bungalows with mailboxes that actually have those little red flags on them.  All the green front lawns are cut in neat straight lines and everyone says hello when you pass.  If saw a pie cooling on a windowsill I wouldn’t be at all surprised.  The gorgeous little yorkie terrier Niles, who belongs to the cousins I am staying with, doesn’t seem to care a fig for the bunnies but he’ll bark heroically for half an hour at an old shell, or - and I hate to say it - black people.  I kind of see why he would be confused: after the mixed bag of New York this place is like a loaf of white bread.  Jim claims he has seen him do it several times and Joan insists it must only be when he’s with Jim as she hasn’t seen it.  I’m just hoping he doesn’t do it around me, because I’ll fall over and die of embarrassment.  Can you imagine?  I shall start calling him Twain if he does.

Unfortunately I did not bring the cord to connect my camera to the computer, so I have no way of sharing with you my photos from the Cape. Hence the silly and / or stolen ones above.  I will post mine when I get back to New York and let you know when they're up!

Finally! One of mine!

The wait at Grimaldis

Back in crazy ol’ New York… The Brooklyn Bridge is a pretty amazing piece of engineering with a fascinating history.  It was the first ever steel wire suspension bridge built and at the time of its completion (1883), was the longest suspension bridge in the world. I imagine that it was probably the only bridge in the world to have been constructed mainly under the supervision of a woman.  If you are curious to read about how that all came about, click here.  I’ve never been one for bridges really, but this one caught my fancy to quite a degree, and as such I took a walk across it after making a disappointing visit to both the famous Grimaldi’s pizza and the equally hyped and lackluster Brooklyn Icecream Factory.  If these institutions were once famous for their comestibles they are now famous for their fame, because the food was not good at either of them, despite the fairly decent wait at Grimaldis and the moderate queue at BIF testifying otherwise.  Still, the bridge walk was fun and afforded some terrific views.  You can click here to visit my Brooklyn album.  If you have seen it before, go to the last photo and click previous to see the most recent ones.

Dessert!

My birthday was fun.  Some of my new friends and I went out for a decent dinner and then went and waited for aaages at a famous patisserie for some dessert.  This was one place where the wait was justified.  The chocolate covered cannoli (here we go again with the sugar) was one of the food highlights of my trip.  Damn the desserts in this place!  It’s like France.  You don’t even want to be bothered with dinner, it’s like “two desserts thanks”.  After dinner we walked to a club but had a fairly tame one.  I knew I was getting old when I caught myself saying for the fifth time “I wish they’d turn the music down!”  Midnight is really it for me these days!  Despite how lovely everyone was to me I did miss Australia on my birthday however, and the friends I normally spend it with.  One of *those* times I guess.  

Travel Tip:  When in New York, GO TO A STAND UP COMEDY CLUB.  It will be money well spent.  Make sure you go to a pro place though.  You will not regret it.  I cried laughing.  Click here to see my latest Manhattan adventures album.

With regard to the book, I still do not have a draft that I feel comfortable sending out to agents, and as such I haven’t done anything with it.  I have slowed down my touristing (I know it’s not a word, but it should be!) in order to spend more time writing but I seem to spend the same amount of time writing and then just more time procrastinating, so it hasn’t helped.  I plan to write some tomorrow and then later in the week once I’m back in the Big Apple, and we’ll just have to see how it goes!  Patience, my pretties.  

Til Next We Speak

*LOVE*

N

Freedom: 20% Off. Limited Offer!

Distance Traveled:   59,760 kms (BNE-MEL-SYD-BKK-PKT-BKK-CNX-BKK-PP-SR-BB-PP-HCMC-NC-TH-HA-H-L-MR-AG-SV-TF-AC-LL-ML-CZ-TF-CZ-SV-L-BP-ZG-SP-LJ-VN-PG-SZ-MN-ZR-GV-ML-FC-RM-FG-MN-VC-CT-RM-PDX-NYC-DC-PH-NYC)

Time Difference: -14 hours (from Brisbane)

Soundtrack: Random
Celebrities Spotted so far: Alec Baldwin, Michelle Obama, Carson Kressley - STILL JUST THESE THREE! I must have had beginner's luck.

Currently Inspired by: Nothing :-(

Stacks: None!  
Words written: 95,532.

One view from Empire State

I wouldn’t go as far as to say my love affair with New York has actually ENDED.  We’re more like a couple in a relationship that has had a fight and neither of us is sure whether or not it’s the last straw.  Forced to continue living in the same space, we circle each other warily, each waiting for the other to make a move before the final decision is made.  For my part, it’s mainly the air I dislike.  I don’t know if I was so excited in my first week that I didn’t really notice, or if it took a good couple of weeks of summer for the stench to really set in, but the fragrant leavings of piss and garbage are a little more than I can deal with.  I cannot believe that residents in a western city this size are still required to leave their rubbish out in bags on the street.  More than that though, is the air quality in general.  New York has some of the most polluted air in the states, and I just generally feel like I can’t breathe properly, like the air is thick and grungy. I have an almost constant frog in my throat.  I really don’t understand how so many great singers can live here!  They must go on regular holidays.  Either that or they have just adapted to it and have lungs of steel.  I wouldn’t want to adapt to it.  Craving clean air.

I love the East Village

That being said, NY remains one of the most exciting places I have ever been, and I’ve been having a wonderful time in all other respects.  My Broadway experiences now include Chicago and Jersey Boys, two fun, slick, colourful romps that were packed to the brim with the most extraordinary talent.  Jersey Boys in particular I found memorable, and if I get the opportunity to see everything I want to see before I leave and have the time and money available, I will see it again.  Chicago has ended, so I feel fortunate that I got to see it at all.  Last Broadway Day (Wednesday) I got back from Philadelphia in the morning, too late to line up for same day matinee tickets, and in the evening I went to the rehearsal of a male barbershop chorus called the Big Apple Chorus, who had a director I really admire, so I didn’t see any shows.  Next week I am hoping to see Avenue Q or Rent off Broadway. Click here to see my album Manhattan: 2.

I was in funky little Philly because I decided to stop there for 24 hours on my way back from Washington DC, where I had a good time with my friend Jay but not such a great time doing the touristy thing.  In hindsight, I probably should have expected what happened.  I farted around for my first two days there and suddenly had to get everything seen on my last day, so I signed up for a six hour bus tour of the city, and ended up spending the day with the kind of people who take six hour bus tours of cities!  Almost foreshadowing the day to follow, I went to a cute little all-American diner and bought myself some take away breakfast before the trip, walked back outside and it was raining.  As I fumbled around getting my umbrella out, I dropped my steaming food all over the sidewalk! :-/

The Big Penis ( aka Washington Monument)

I presume because we were visiting the political heart of the US, the tour guide felt free to share his personal political and religious beliefs with us, “God Bless”ing us regularly, and there was a great deal of hand-on-heart, pro-war, teary-eyed sentimentality and jingoistic nationalism being spouted all over the place that made me cringe and want to crawl away.  DC contains many glorious war monuments slathered with pithy brainwashing propaganda like “Freedom Is Not Free” just in case its citizens dare to forget for a second that the USA is always righteous and its wars have been necessary actions they took in order to protect the sacred American way of life.  Last time I checked freedom was one of the few things that was actually free on this planet! It is war that is massively expensive, both in the financial cost and in the number of young lives that are unnecessarily wasted. In case you aren’t sure what propaganda is, here are two more examples that were bandied about regularly on that day: “Ministry of Defense” and “Operation Enduring Freedom”. Ugh. I began feeling quite stabby after a while.

Lincoln Memorial

I laughed - alternating between rage and disbelief - looking at the stunning memorials to Roosevelt and Jefferson, great orators if nothing else, covered in stirring and beautifully written quotes about how everyone is created equal and a society’s progress should be measured by how it takes care of all its citizens rather than how it makes its rich people richer.  This, right smack bang in the midst of a city that has a greater disparity between the haves and have-nots that I’ve ever seen (with the possible exception of Bangkok).  The latest pimped out gas guzzlers drive with locked doors and tinted windows past neighbourhoods with doors hanging off their hinges and homeless people sleeping in every shuttered shopfront.  This is the place where the people being paid huge sums to run the country based on those aforementioned ideals are instead making decisions to go into trillions of dollars of debt to kill innocent people in other countries, rather than going into debt or even finding a way to pay for a national health care system.  It’s all such sandpit, pissing contest crap too.  My truck is bigger than your truck!  I want THAT toy! I was exhausted at the end of the day, and not the good kind of exhausted, the depressed kind.

Good Ol' MLK

On the positive side, DC has some beautiful areas, The MLK memorial is good (someone who actually practiced what they preached) I had some yummy food, saw cute little Georgetown, tasted the best soft serve frozen yoghurt I’ve ever eaten (I’m obsessed and have been hunting it down in the city here to do comparisons) and on the first night my friend took me for a drive and a bit of a walk through a park where this fantastic band was playing for free.  People were getting up and really dancing like mad.  It was great music so I decided to join in and jumped around like a maniac for a couple of songs before hearing a lyric that worried me a little.  I walked back to Jay and said “this isn’t a religious thing, is it?” “Noo!” he said, but after the end of a song a guy jumped up on stage and started blathering about the Tribe of Judah or some shit.  EEEEK! is the best way to describe my thoughts at that point.  I grabbed my stuff and we made a run for it – it must have looked so funny.  What I want to know is when did religious rock music get good?  They tricked us!  You can click here to see my pics from Washington DC. 

Here are just a few pics I took in Philadelphia on my way back to NY.  I basically just walked around for an afternoon.  Seems like a groovy and friendly place, but just another western city for all of that.  I was hosted there by some couchsurfers who were very cool people, as most couchsurfers I have met tend to be.

One of the Towers

Other NY touristy things on the menu over the last couple of weeks were the Empire State Building, Cirque Du Soleil, Brooklyn Heights and the 9/11 memorial, a large yet tasteful and sobering memorial inscribed with the names of those that died in the September 11 attacks.  I was transported back to 2001, driving to work and not believing what I was hearing on the radio.  Does everyone else remember really clearly what they were doing when they heard the news?  The new “Freedom Towers” are currently being constructed in their stead. (Freedom is the most overused word in this country.  My friend went to a restaurant where they actually had a Freedom Salad!  I joked that it was probably a burger and fries.) These new towers would have to be the creepiest buildings in existence, although they look pretty impressive so far.  You couldn’t get me to work in those places for anything.  Not that anyone would ask me haha!  That whole area is banking and finance central.  Suits galore.  Walking around Wall Street with a friend the other day we were laughing “Can you feel the evil?”  It’s amazing how different all of NY’s neighbourhoods are, like separate cities.

The famous brownstones

The Empire State Building gives an amazing view of the city, but I spent about ten minutes at the top and at least two hours getting up and back down again, so you need to be patient and also have the time to do it.  After the fact (always the way) I heard that you get a very similar view from the Rockerfeller Centre and it isn’t anywhere near as busy.  So there’s a tip for future NY travelers. Zarkana was incredible – my first Cirque du Soleil actually – and it was in the Radio City Music Hall which has to be the most beautiful venue I’ve ever seen.  Brooklyn Heights is a writers’ haven and is full of those brownstones and Asian nannies walking the streets with their little designer clad charges while mum and dad no doubt work sixteen hours a day in the city. The Brooklyn Bridge is a very impressive piece of engineering, considering when it was built.  Click here to see my Brooklyn album, which includes pictures of the evening I spent with the Sweet Adelines Brooklyn Chorus, a lovely and welcoming group of ladies who hosted me overnight and took me around the next day.  I love barbershop!  Insta-friends.

I really need to stop tanning!

Speaking of Sweet Adelines, my Sirens and I hosted a guest night the other night in conjunction with the boys upstairs (Voices of Gotham) and ended up out and singing until 3am with a bunch of the prospective members.  I’m having sooo much fun with these two choruses.  It’s going to be difficult to leave!  You can click here to see some of my new singing guy and gal pals. 

I also have a third Manhattan album as I don't want one album with millions of photos in it.  Click here to see it.  I realise I haven’t mentioned the book.  Yes well, hmm.  I didn’t get sufficient feedback from my first lot of readers to feel like there was much I could do with it, so rather than read it and edit it myself I’ve kind of lost motivation instead and have been procrastinating quite badly.  This week I have only a couple of things on (including my birthday dinner on Friday night!  I wish my usual friends were here for our usual birthday dinner) so I am going to try and force myself to work on it.  It would be a shame to get this far and then choke at the end.  Wish me luck!

Til Next We Speak

*LOVE*

N