Part Two: New York!

Wednesday was such a tiring day, but it was so amazing and such an experience!

I had to get up at 3:30 am because I had to be at Union Station by 5:00 for the bus to leave at 5:15. I wanted to get to the station early to by breakfast, booked a taxi for 4:30. I got to Union Station about 4:35 and went to get breakfast. I was at Au Bon Pain trying to decide what I wanted when this security guard comes up to me and starts to talk to me! Now I was still half asleep and not really in the mood to talk, but I stood there and listened to him because I didn't want to be deported! Ten minutes later me fellow intern who was coming with me and my supervisor shows up and the security guard pretty much restarts his stories About 4:45 he left us and we were able to get our breakfasts. We got to the bus 5:00ish and found my supervisor. We were on a double decker bus! There weren't many people on the bus, but I sat we my fellow intern and my supervisor sat behind. Five minutes into the drive Valerie, my supervisor, was fast asleep. The intern and I talked and looked out the windows for about two and a half hours. We stopped in Baltimore to get more people and the bus filled up to the max. We woke up from our naps just in time to drive into New York City. The view of the city was spectacular and it was quite overwhelming.

We drove under the river and got off the bus stop about 10:00ish. We hopped in a taxi and headed over to the Intrepid Museum for the re-opening of the Shuttle Enterprise exhibit. We got there about 10:30 and the ceremony had just finished! We were all quite disappointed by that because we didn't get to hear the speeches or anything. However, we did get to into the exhibit before the public. The other intern and I were pretty much given a private tour by Valerie. Valerie used to be responsible for the Enterprise before it was transferred to the Intrepid and she got Discovery.  It was really cool to have her there! She commented on how the exhibit set up and explained all the artifacts and why things they looked the way they did! It was interesting to see the Enterprise which never flew in space and compare it to Discovery who had been in space multiple times. The Enterprise was much cleaner and had a little bit of a different look to it. The Enterprise was meant to fly, but NASA decided that it would have cost more to refit Enterprise that was a test Shuttle and make it a real one then building a whole new shuttle. That's why the Enterprise never flew in space. However, NASA would come in to the museum every once in a while and take parts of the shuttle to preform tests on it. Because of that the Enterprise has holes in it. In the end we spent about an hour and a half in Enterprise exhibit.

The Intrepid is a airplane carrier! We spent another hour and a half on rest of the ship. We did it pretty quickly because we were hungry. Owen, the other intern and I'm pretty sure he's my brother from another country, and I went into the Growler which is a submarine from the Cold War. This submarine was stationed outside of the USSR and was meant to rise to the surface and deploy to nuclear missiles if the US was attacked by the USSR. It was so small! You really got a feel for how these men must have lived and how little space they had to do it in. 

After we went to lunch at Landmark Tavern which is a block from the museum and I had a really good veggie wrap. Following that Valerie set Owen and I free because she was catching an earlier bus back. The two of us decided to go to the Tenement Museum so we got on the subway and headed that way. When we got to the right stop we tried to get to the surface, but we had a lot of trouble! We kept wandering around the subway and at one point ended back where we started. Eventually we got out and found the museum. How this museum works is that you choose and hour or an hour and a half tour and they take you to these tenements that they have bought along Orchard street. We chose to go on the Sweatshop tour. This tour focused on Jewish immigrants, one family from Poland who lived there in the 1890's and a Lithuanian family who lived there from 1911 to 1934 when the building was evicted and shut down. We weren't aloud to take pictures inside, so I having nothing to show you so I'll try to describe it. We went up to the third floor and the first apartment we went into was in the original state of when the museum bought the building. You could see the paint and wall paper peeling off the walls. Our tour guide was saying that you could tell how many families had lived in that apartment by how many layers there were on the wall. I guess in one area they have found 20 layers of wall paper! These apartments only had three rooms, a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. It was all 340 square feet, so really small! We went into another apartment that had been reconstructed to be like a 1890's apartment that the Polish family probably would have lived in. This family consisted of the two parents and five children. The father ran a tailors business out of the living room, aka a sweatshop. He would get a contract from a company telling him to make 100 dresses in 10 days. He would then hire 3 more people. That means in the 340 square foot apartment there were 10 people in there for ten hours a day six days a week! It was really hot in there with only eight of us for 30 minutes. It must have been terrible with 10 people for 10 hours with a coal fireplace burning! Since the guy was Jewish he took Saturdays off instead of Sundays and had fellow Jews work for him that had the same practices. We were told that if someone didn't show up for work you could just go into the street and hire someone else. Orchard street was so busy that you had to use your elbows to get through the crowd! After that apartment we went to the Lithuanian one. This family lived there in 1911 and things were a little bit different. There were eight of them in that apartment. The father again had his own tailoring business and his eldest daughter worked for him. They sent the other five children out into the world. The two boys opened an import/export business, but the girls went to work in factories. Factories ran on a Christian schedule, meaning they worked Monday to Saturday and took Sunday off. This family really showed the sacrifices of ones culture and religion to make ones way in the world. Our tour guide told us how one Saturday in 1911 there were protesters outside a factory. In order to stop them getting in and to keep his workforce working a factory owner locked his all female staff in the factory. A fire broke out and the 174 women inside were killed because there was no way out. I guess word spread quickly and most of the community was Jewish and hoped that their girls didn't perish. It made it even more terrible that it was on a Saturday when the Jews were supposed to be home with their family an not working. The museum was inspiring and it gives me different ideas on how history can be presented.

The last thing we did that day was go to Katz Deli. It's supposed to be the best deli in New York. A scene for When Harry Met Sally was filmed there. I got a HUGE Swiss cheese  sandwich, cheesecake, pickles and a cream soda. Owen almost got the same thing except he got a pastrami sandwich. We got it to go, but first we sat down to enjoy the atmosphere and try a bit of our sandwiches which were delicious! I had a hard time getting me mouth around mine! About 6 pm we headed towards the subway because we had to catch the bus at 6:40. 

We hadn't taken into consideration the time it takes for the Metro to come and the time to go up and down the stairs. By the time we got to 34th Street and 6th Ave it was 6:25 and we had to get to 34th and 11th. We started walking because traffic was so bad that it was faster. We got down two of New York's giant blocks and looked at the time. It was 6:32 and we still had a long way to go. We looked at each other and Owen asked "Run?" which I nodded my head at, so we began to book it down 34th. Both of us were carrying three bags, our bag we brought with us, a bag full of souvenirs from the Tenement and our bag full of food. We ran down 34th like our life depended on it weaving in and out between people and flaying awkwardly! We got to 11th Ave at 6:39 and there was no bus! There was a big crowd of people by the megabus sign so we asked them if the 6:40 bus had come yet and we were told no. So we made it! In the end the bus didn't show up until 7:40. We piled on the bus an hour late exhausted and we agreed that we would keep each other awake the whole 5ish hours back. On the way back we both ate half of our sandwiches and we told each other stories. I told Owen about my epic present making abilities and my amazing boyfriend and he told me about his girlfriend of five years and him being a history camp councilor. We successfully made it back to Union Station at 12:20 without either of us falling asleep! Yesterday was a great first time in New York and I'll probably never forget it!