Today diary...
-- Smartened from yesterday, I went to the NBC rainbow room entrance at 8.30 am waiting for a ticket to Conan O'Brien's Late Night Show filming; they would start giving those tickets out at 9.00 am. However, at 8.30 am there was already a line with 90 people before me, and they would only give 75 tickets. Another no-win situation.
---- I also overheard that of those 75, probably only the 30 or 40 first have actual chance of getting in at 4.00 pm. The first ones arrived at 5.30 am. If I want to still pursue this, I should probably go queuing at 7.00 am tomorrow... Maybe I'll just give up. Yes, Finns have been showing up noticeably often at Conan's audience, but not all Finns visiting NYC are that desperate to get there. If they don't want us, then that'll they get.
-- Then I strolled through the Central Park from south to north (last time, I stropped the same distance from north to south, but most of it on the Fifth Avenue instead of in the park). In the process, I got minor sunburns in my shoulders and arms.
-- Later at the evening, I checked out the WTC construction site. It looks pretty much like any construction site; the only sign of that it was not planned to be like that is the great effort by which traffic, including pedestrian traffic, is redirected around the block, and the number of securitymen around the perimeter.
-- I bought a camera. Recalling reading someone's writing that one should buy those stuff from little stores instead of the big ones, because the big ones have twice the prices of their Internet prices but the little ones have reasonable prices, I went to a little store. However, I was somewhat unprepared for the way they deal business. I'll describe it like this.
---- They don't have any prices listed. Instead, you tell what you want to buy, and they tell the price.
---- After you agree to have made a purchase decision, the price suddenly inflates by a factor of ~200% because they invent various taxes and stuff. At that point, you are supposed to start bargaining to get the price down. However, I was somewhat unprepared for this process so I didn't get the price much down (only $20 from their initial offer) and didn't get the gear in my brain running that would have made me calculate exactly what kind of "tax" they were applying. Nevertheless, the price is not considerably less than or greater than that which it would have been in Finland, so I'm not complete unhappy. Just mostly.
---- They also tried to make me buy a 1 GB memory card for the camera. Their memory card box contained a whopping $119.90 price tag. Their initial offer was $59. After I refused numerous times, the price had dropped to $39, but it was still way too high for even be in the realm of possible purchases. And they drove me through the guilt trip for not purchasing it even though they cut open that box and all.
-- I also checked out Brooklyn, just so that my entire perception of New York is not made only about Manhattan.
---- I only checked a few blocks, so it's hardly a balanced opinion, but the impression I got that it's more busy than Manhattan, and more youthful. Curiously, on one of those streets, literally every second shop offered sneakers. As in, they explicitly advertised doing that in particular.
More observations about NYC in general:
-- Women have big tits. This may sound weird coming from me, but really, compared to Europeans, women in NYC have bigger tits. Though in all fairness, they have larger asses too. Nevertheless, even though I'm not a person to stare at women's breasts (in fact, I'm less interested of that particular section in woman anatomy than an average male is), I can't help but be unsettled when I notice a young (black) woman whose chest around the breasts is literally twice as big as it's 15 cm down from that section. I wonder how she manages her life. She must be stared at a lot.
-- [EDIT 2008-07-20]: {placeholder for more observations I had in mind but can't remember right now} I remember now. Emergency vehicles here sound really weird. They don't produce a continuous biibaa/biiubiiubiiu signal, but instead, they sound like this: "biuuu. bauuu! baupoubiuuuuu. biuuu! biubauuuuu." and so on. With occassional uses of a nasty sounding horn.
