Flashback: March 17, 2008
Dateline: Monday March 17, 2008
London, England (Heathrow airport)
Sitting in the terminal building waiting for boarding of flight AA105 to JFK International in New York City. I’ve decided that nowhere can you get a decent cup of coffee in London. No-one quite knows how to make a great cappuccino and the ones that you do buy never seem to be full cups. You always seem to get a cup that is only two thirds to three quarters full.
Got to Heathrow in good time. Uneventful flight to New York. Watched All The Presidents Men and some British film with Billie Piper in it.
Getting through US Customs and Border Protection was no problem, except that it took so long – close to an hour. Each index finger was scanned and a photo of my face was also taken, and added to their huge database of foreign visitors.
By the time I got through Customs and to the baggage carousel to pick my luggage up, it was sitting on the floor with a bunch of others that had simply been off-loaded by (presumably) baggage handlers, and left there for anyone to pick up and walk away with. At least it hadn’t been destroyed in a controlled explosion by paranoid, security conscious staff!
It took another half hour before I could finally get a cab to the YMCA. I waited, not because there were no taxis, but because the queue was so long. Welcome to New York. I told the taxi driver where I wanted to go, and he seemed to be making good progress getting there by the quickest, most direct route – until he got lost in a warren of narrow, traffic laden streets close to my destination. The driver knew the general location of Greenpoint, the Brooklyn suburb the YMCA is located in, but that was all. He kept stopping to ask the locals where the actual YMCA was, but most of them had no idea themselves.
Thankfully, I had printed out a Google map of the area surrounding the YMCA, with just enough information on it for me to help the driver find the building. Once we were on Manhattan Avenue, the main road we needed to be on, and heading in the right direction, I was able to guide him to Meserole Avenue, the street the ‘Y’ was on. If I hadn’t printed that page out, we might still be driving around looking for the place!
I thought it quite ironic that having just arrived in New York for the first time, it was I who actually found the way for the taxi driver.
London, England (Heathrow airport)
Sitting in the terminal building waiting for boarding of flight AA105 to JFK International in New York City. I’ve decided that nowhere can you get a decent cup of coffee in London. No-one quite knows how to make a great cappuccino and the ones that you do buy never seem to be full cups. You always seem to get a cup that is only two thirds to three quarters full.
Got to Heathrow in good time. Uneventful flight to New York. Watched All The Presidents Men and some British film with Billie Piper in it.
Getting through US Customs and Border Protection was no problem, except that it took so long – close to an hour. Each index finger was scanned and a photo of my face was also taken, and added to their huge database of foreign visitors.
By the time I got through Customs and to the baggage carousel to pick my luggage up, it was sitting on the floor with a bunch of others that had simply been off-loaded by (presumably) baggage handlers, and left there for anyone to pick up and walk away with. At least it hadn’t been destroyed in a controlled explosion by paranoid, security conscious staff!
It took another half hour before I could finally get a cab to the YMCA. I waited, not because there were no taxis, but because the queue was so long. Welcome to New York. I told the taxi driver where I wanted to go, and he seemed to be making good progress getting there by the quickest, most direct route – until he got lost in a warren of narrow, traffic laden streets close to my destination. The driver knew the general location of Greenpoint, the Brooklyn suburb the YMCA is located in, but that was all. He kept stopping to ask the locals where the actual YMCA was, but most of them had no idea themselves.
Thankfully, I had printed out a Google map of the area surrounding the YMCA, with just enough information on it for me to help the driver find the building. Once we were on Manhattan Avenue, the main road we needed to be on, and heading in the right direction, I was able to guide him to Meserole Avenue, the street the ‘Y’ was on. If I hadn’t printed that page out, we might still be driving around looking for the place!
I thought it quite ironic that having just arrived in New York for the first time, it was I who actually found the way for the taxi driver.
posted by Jim Lesses at
12:27 AM
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