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June 28, 2007
Chester likes the playground II
June 22, 2007
More from my brother
More from my brother on working on the Bollywood film:
For about two and a half weeks, I worked as an "art department
assistant" on a Bollywood film called "Hastey Hastey." The crew, which
was largely shipped in from India, all stayed in a rather unusual Best Western in N.J.
Although untypical of hotels in New Jersey, this sort of hotel is
apparently quite common in India. They serve only Indian food, and
almost all of the guests are Indian.
The crew was expected to work 12-16 hour days, with no days off, for
forty days straight. Often, we would get back to the hotel at
midnight, with a 7:00 AM call time the next morning. Needless to say,
I wasn't happy with this arrangement, and I quit one week ago (I gave
one week's notice, and Wednesday was my last day). I think some of the
Americans are getting fed up, and there might be a mass walk-out some
time soon.
The production was very poorly organized, with the producers often
neglecting to get shooting permits for locations. I guess they
intended on showing up and quickly filming without being noticed... in
MANHATTAN.
My job was to drive a box truck carrying the wardrobe supplies. I'm a
really terrible driver, and I smashed into numerous inanimate objects
(fortunately, the damage wasn't entirely noticeable). I got lost
pretty much every time I got into the truck. A lot of my driving was
through midtown Manhattan, including Times Square.
The people, in general, were pretty nice. They taught me some Hindi,
mostly swear words. By the end of the shoot, their enthusiasm for
teaching me dirty words became unnerving.
Some of the actors are apparently rather famous in India.
Here are some publicity shots.
The short dude is like the Indian Rob Snyder.
June 20, 2007
Chester likes the playground
One in a...
What's more boring: Counting to a million, or watching someone else count to a million?
He thinks it will take about three months. He lost 7 pounds in 3 days. He's nuts. But he has sponsors.
June 19, 2007
Day 2
We didn't start with much of a plan our second day in New York, other than we knew that we'd meet up with my brother later.
My brother has lived in NYC for a little over two years. First in the Village, now in Brooklyn. He has had an assortment of odd jobs -- canvassing for local politicians, giving piano lessons, working a desk job at the transportation department; but right now he's a production assistant on a Bollywood movie.
His main job, from what he's told me, is to help transport people from once place to another in New Jersey, where they are shooting. Pretty much every Bollywood movie is a musical, and he said for this one, the producers wanted to have a dance scene in Times Square. With the dancers suspended in a tank of water. Being driven around.
What could possibly go wrong?
I don't know who explained to them that it was a terrible idea (especially if they are trying to save money -- it was cheaper for them to fly their whole production crew in from India than to hire locals).
Back to day two.
We headed north on Lexington to "Bagles and More" and grabbed some breakfast - scrambled eggs on a bagel and a couple extra sesame seed bagels for later. This turned out to become a reoccurring plan, as we'd usually buy a couple extra bagels in the morning (at 80 cents a pop) and have them for lunch with an apple or other snack.
We took our breakfast to Bryant Park and enjoyed the weather. It looked like it might hold out, but the rain would catch up to us later in the day.
After enjoying our time at the park (and being accompanied by a couple birds begging for crumbs and an impromptu musical performance by a small assembly of brass players), and afterward checked out Grand Central Terminal. It was pretty neat but I have to admit it was a little smaller than I thought it would be. They had a free exhibit on NY and the movies, with some backdrops from the 1930's and some still frames from different movies shot in the Big Apple.
After Grand Central, we walked over to the U.N. I'm assuming they didn't have the flags up because it was Sunday.
Munched on some apples in front of the library.
Then a rest back at the hotel.
Talked to my brother, it would be a little longer for him to get over from Jersey to meet us. He'd be coming in at Penn Station, so we just decided to meet him there.
After dropping his stuff off at our room, we made our first subway ride of NY. Headed down (the 6?) down to the Brooklyn Bridge. When we emerged it had started to rain. We considered turning back away from the bridge, but decided to chance it.
As it turned out it didn't rain too hard, and Aimee and I took shelter under our small umbrella as my umbrellaless (wow, spell check tells me that is a word) brother felt the brunt of the small drops.
The walk out on the bridge was fantastic. I would definitely recommend it.
We decided to head over to Ground Zero after the bridge. Along the way Jon bought an umbrella from a street vendor. They went for $3 but he talked her down to $2.50.
Ground Zero was interesting. We just saw it from the east side, not a great vantage point, but the sheer size or real estate that is empty is impressive. We looked at some of the photos and read about the plans for the Freedom Tower.
After Ground Zero was Wall Street, passing St. Paul's Chapel along the way.
We left lower Manhattan for dinner. At the suggestion of my brother we went to Vittorio on Bleecker Street in the Village. Good, yes. But a little pricey. Portions could have been a little better, too, as I left a little hungry after my Ravioli (the idea, as with an actual Italian restaurant, is that you order an appetizer, pasta, and a main course... but we wanted some money left over for the rest of the trip -- I figured we could get a snack later).
When we got back to the hotel after the long walk up 5th Ave from Washington Square Park admiring the Empire State Building all the way -- yes, we are tourists, we look up at buildings. We watched a little of the Democratic Debate on CNN. Go Kucinich! We said our goodbye to Jon and headed out in search of a snack. It was raining pretty well by this point, so we settled on something easy -- Starbucks pastries with hot chocolate.
Walking in the rain wasn't very fun, so we hoped it would clear up soon. We turned out to have pretty good luck with the weather the rest of the trip ...
June 13, 2007
NY Day 1
Note: For some more pictures and notes see my NY Photo set.
The flight to NY went pretty smoothly. We flew Midwest Airlines at suggestion of my mom on the sole basis that they bake cookies on board each flight.
Yeah. The cookies were good. Plus, the seats are nice and big and cushy.
We arrived around 4:30 or so at LaGuardia, picked up our bags, and headed out toward the taxi area.
I wasn't really sure about finding a taxi at the airport - do we flag one down? Find one sitting around? As we were heading out the doors, a guy asked us where we were going. I said Manhattan. He said he was a limo driver and he'd give us a ride. "It's okay, another guy is coming" (how does that make it okay?) At first I sort of agreed, then asked if he was yellow cab. He said no. I told him we were looking for a yellow cab (thank you, NYC Guidebook). He just sort of walked off.
Then we spotted a short line for the yellow taxis. We told a guy holding a clipboard we were headed toward Manhattan and he told us what cab to get into. Very painless. Later, Aimee said she saw Caroline "Biggest Loser" Rhea in the line ahead of us, but I didn't notice.
While waiting for the taxi we heard over the loudspeaker, "Don't accept unsolicited rides." Good advice.
The ride to our hotel was short and relatively inexpensive. There's just a fixed rate from either airport, plus tip.
We hung out in our hotel room for a little bit while we recovered from the flights.
Before the trip I did some searching online for a hotel. It was a bit of a shot in the dark, but most reviews said Hotel 31 was pretty decent, so that's what we chose. We were pleasantly surprised. It wasn't anything special, but it was clean and quiet. I was expecting our nights in the city to be full of honking horns and sirens as I remembered my previous stays there, but it was as quiet as a night in Iowa. I guess that's saying something.
At the hotel, we opted for the "shared bath" because it's a bit cheaper and we didn't plan on spending a lot of time in our room, anyway. We did have a sink in our dorm-sized room, which was nice.
The location was great. East 31st street between Park and Lexington. Easy access to everything -- walk up to Midtown, jump on the subway to Downtown and the Brooklyn Bridge, some good restaurants nearby. Close to the Empire State Building (East 34th) , too, which is what we'd stare at as we were walking up or down Fifth Ave back to our place.
I'd been to NY two other times. Both were pretty short stays, and I just sort of followed my parents around so I didn't really get a good feel for the layout of the city. This time I had a better understanding both of the history and layout of the city.
Ready to head out for the first time, we headed north, not really having a plan in mind. We soon found ourselves by the Public Library, Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's. We kept going north to the 5th Avenue Apple Store. We cut through the park to Columbus Circle, down Broadway, ate at the Seattle Cafe near Times Square (despite its name, it was Mediterranean food -- I had the lamb with rice, lettuce, tomato, pita -- Aimee had the same but with falafel). We walked through the Broadway/Times Square area and started to make our way back to the hotel.
It was around 10:30 and we decided to first check out the lines for the Empire State Building. We were considering going near dusk to get the Daylight -- sunset -- night experience all in one, but decided it would be a fun thing to do since it was a nice night and we weren't sure if we'd have many nice evenings (rain was on its way from tropical storm Barry).
We each got a Citypass, which ended up saving us a lot of money (Citypass gets you into the Empire State Building observation deck, the Guggenheim, MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, and a Circle Line Harbor Cruise - we did all but the Guggenheim). It's also supposed to save you time not having to wait in line, but we only found this true at MOMA (which was nice to avoid the long line outside on a rainy morning).
It turned out to be about a 30 minute wait in line to get to the 86th floor observation deck. We bypassed a lot of empty line (you know they kind they rope off, and when nobody is in line you have to jump over). I can see how the wait could get extremely long. It's made a little more frustrating by the fact that there are about 5 different lines. One to get tickets, one to get through security, one to get on the elevators, one to get your picture taken (they try to sell you a photo afterward), one to get the audio guide, another to get on the stairs or take another elevator up the last six floors).
The top of the ESB was a lot of fun. Tried to take some pictures sans tripod, and a couple turned out okay. It was a bit crowded up there, so you had to fight a little bit for a good spot.
We did a lot of walking the first day, and saw a lot for just starting out at 6 p.m. Next... day 2... more walking, a little rain, the Brooklyn Bridge, and some expensive Italian food.
June 10, 2007
Big Apple
If you fly out of New York, try to avoid a day when air traffic controller computers melt down.
Our departure from NYC went something like this:
We had to check out at noon from our hotel, so we decided to just go straight to the airport even though our flight wasn't till 5:30 p.m. The taxi ride was quick and easy and we killed a couple hours reading in the food court before heading through security. Once we reached our gate, around 3:30 or so, we heard a rumor that a flight to Detroit was cancelled due to weather.
No big deal, I thought. They're not that far from Milwaukee, though. Are they? Should have studied geography harder in school. Dang it.
We listened further to people talking around us and heard that our flight was delayed until 10 p.m., which isn't good since we needed to get to Milwaukee by 9 p.m. to make our connection to Des Moines.
I went to a Midwest flight check-in guy (I have no idea what their title is) and he confirmed the flight was delayed and was nice enough to transfer us to a direct flight to Des Moines through American Airlines.
We were a little stressed getting our luggage back and getting our new boarding passes, but we made it with some time to spare for our new 6:20 flight.
As we were headed through security a TSA worker told us ALL flights were cancelled.
What?
We decided to go through security to our gate, anyway. Turns out all flights weren't cancelled, but ours was delayed an hour or so.
At this point I'd like to mention that LaGuardia is not a very good airport. It's small, doesn't have enough Arrival/Departure video screens, and not enough televisions to help pass the time. And they are really poor at communicating.
Flights were being cancelled left and right and we didn't really have any idea why.
The weather might have had something to do with it, too. From what we were told there was a system stretching from Texas to Canada, and they weren't letting any westbound traffic out of the airport.
The communication from airport officials was pretty frustrating. We never officially heard anything about a computer glitch, but I called up Aaron and he read a story to me about LaGuardia being the hardest hit from it.
Eventually around 9 p.m. we were told we could start boarding our plane - but it was a little premature. The plane hadn't been cleaned yet. Then the pilot put the plane in "holding" and we were told to wait around. And wait. And wait. I thought for sure the flight would be cancelled and called my brother who lives in Brooklyn to make arrangements in case we needed to stay there the night.
Eventually more and more flights seemed to be departing and we were called to board our plane (for real!). We sat another hour and a half waiting for clearance from the tower and we were finally on our way after 11 p.m., about 11 hours after we arrived at the airport.
We were quite tired through the three hour flight home, and thankfully slept through a lot of it.
That was pretty much our only misfortune on our trip to New York, but it was a stressful one.
Oh, and on our flight out we heard news of the JFK Terror plot arrests, so we were book-ended by New York airport oddities.
Pictures from the trip can be found here (with more on the way) and I'll update with more from our trip soon.
