More New York City | The Panama Adventure

I’ve got this section down to 25 pictures 😁 There are too many interesting places in the city, and the weather was perfect for taking beautiful pictures. Most of the pictures have captions so with any luck, when you click on them, you can see the descriptions.

We bought tickets to two performances. The first was Cabaret on Broadway and it was fabulous. The show had been redone, even including the theater. The stage was in the middle and they wanted the audience to feel like they were in an actual nightclub. But, the show was only part of the whole experience. You came in through the basement storage area like you were sneaking into an actual nightclub. There were cherry liquor shots waiting at the top of the stairs if you wanted one, and stickers were put on your phone to cover the camera. Then you find yourself is a large bar area, which was worth the price of admission right there. There were wandering musicians and dancers on the stage, on the bar, in a corner, and in the audience and what amazing dancers there were! We got to enjoy this for maybe an hour before we went into the theater for the actual performance. Of course that was amazing, like we knew it would be from reading reviews and information on line. One thing that impressed me was the diversity of the performers both in the bar and in the show. There were various colors, sizes, and ages but all were wonderful.

Our adventure the next day was the opera Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera House. This is one of the best opera houses in the world so you know you are going to see top notch performances, and this one was no exception. The music, the singing, and the acting were amazing. I’m not sure about the sets though. The opera was written about 150 years ago, but they took a modern approach with sets that looked like scaffolding, rusty trucks, and modern dress. I prefer a more traditional look but this was ok except the very end. It’s a love story between Carmen, a free spirited gypsy, and Don Jose, a soldier. He falls totally in love and gives up everything to follow her, but she tires of him and falls for a bullfighter. At the end they are outside the arena. She wants to go in to be with her bullfighter, but Don Jose is desperate to keep her. The very last thing, as she rushes toward the entrance, he lifts his hand with a knife and plunges it into her chest, killing her. There just is no substitute for that visual, and their version where he wackes her head with a bassball bat just didn’t do it. But, it’s hard to complain too much when you are in NYC at the most amazing performance you can see anywhere!

The opera was a mantanee so we had time to wander around afterward, and have a most interesting dinner! Gayle’s Broadway Rose is a restaurant where the waiters and waitresses are also Broadway singers, so between taking care of customers they went through the restaurant singing show tunes. It was really cool, and they were really good! It was loud and a bit chaotic but the food was very good, and we had a lot of fun watching and listening to the performances. It’s definitely a unique restaurant!

We wandered around the theater district and these pictures are pretty self explainatory. It was fun to see theaters that we have heard about for ages, where shows are made that we have watched on TV. We were excited to see Hombres G was performaing at Radio City Music Hall. They are a band from Madrid that we like, and we do a couple of their songs. If you want some fun look them up on YouTube.

I have a few other random things here… The market down the street apparently is a recycling center. You can bring your things there, and they had a big shipment on the curb packed up and waiting for pickup.

The Steinway Tower is the world’s skinniest skyscraper. I wonder what it looks and feels like inside. Each apartment is one full floor and 4500 square feet, so it can’t be too cramped. I don’t think I would like it on a windy day though. It’s been built to be flexible, which is better than stiff and breakable. In this bunch of photos are also a couple scenes of the theater area going down Broadway towards Times Square. It was quite crowded with tourists, traffic, street vendors, bicycles, and tons of activity. I often walked to classes through Times Square and don’t remember it being quite like that, but back in that day it was full of porn theaters and less attractive things.

There are also a couple pictures of Rockefeller Center and St Patrick’s Cathedral.

I that is about it for this collection of photos. I’ll try and get to the last batch soon.

Of course lots of things in NYC were different. I left there in 1979! But, a lot of things were the same, or maybe the same but bigger. Zabar’s, the great deli was there but 3-4x bigger, and Fairway, my favorite produce store was also much, much bigger. There were many new buildings all over the city, but also many buildings that I remember well. I don’t think the subway has changed one bit, except how you pay. We had tokens back then, and now you have a card, or you can even touch your credit card to allow the turnstile to turn. I had many $2.80 charges on my credit card! (and that price has definitely changed over the decades, but it’s still a super efficient way to get around).

Another thing I don’t remember at all is bicycles. They were everywhere! There were stations of rental bikes in many places, and those bikes could be seen on the streets along with personal bikes. There were bike lanes in some areas, but people rode right in traffic down Broadway and didn’t seem to have any problems. It was a joke in the past that you could instantly tell a NYC car because it was banged up, but I noticed that the cars were almost all free of dents and scratches. I wonder if people drive better these days, or electronic sensors in the cars help, or what, but it seemed much better than in the past.

Oh my though, speaking of driving, we took a taxi from Newark Airport to our hotel. What a trip! He had a big Surburban without a scratch on it, so I guessed he has been pretty good at driving but my goodness. He switched from English to Arabic on the phone for very heated conversations. Apparently, his daughter was taking extra math classes, and they were expecting him to pay for what he thought they had already paid for. It sounds like this was a HUGE deal and he went back and forth with mom and grandma for much of the trip. He started texting which I immediately told him he couldn’t do, so he put that phone down. Then he proceeded to pluck his nose hairs for a good while. The rest of the time he used his vape and cussed at the other drivers in colorful language, telling us that this language was mild compared to what he would use if we weren’t there. He even got into a fight with another driver. They put down their windows at a stop light and yelled names at each other! There was enough traffic to keep us at a reasonable speed and we were in a huge vehicle so he probably couldn’t kill us, so I figured it was a colorful NYC adventure. Decaf though… I recommend decaf, nothing but decaf 😁

We are gearing up for a band gig this coming week so that is keeping us busy, but I’ll try to get to the rest of the pictures soon. Then I’ll go back to posting about Panama, where not much is going on. The joke is the conversation around here is – Is it going to rain? or is it not going to rain? Ha! It’s rainy season so chances are good it’s going to rain. Sometimes it rains a little, and sometimes it rain a whole lot but it’s cooler and the plants are happy. The canal is happy too as they are able to increase traffic and return to more normal operations. So, until next time, you all take care!