As planned, we (Vathsa and me) started off towards New York City (NYC from now on) and Rags was kind enough to extract a few minutes (from his busy Saturday work schedule) to take both of us to Newark Penn Station (yes, it’s Newark and there is no typo). It’s a whole different story that he tried a new route and took three hours to get back to the apartment. Feeling is one of a kind when the train slowly comes overground and pulls into the station (located where World Trade Center used to be) - huge skyscrapers show up in every direction unravelling a near-magical transformation. As we took stairs to get out of the station, a sign-board (see picture alongside) described what I was getting myself into

After making sure that hunger didn’t stop us from seeing what we had planned to see (Burger King on Broadway offers free WiFi as well as wired terminals to access the internet), my photographic expedition of NYC began on a decievingly bright sunny day with clear blue skies but very cold strong breeze (very cold and stong for New Yorkers; to me, it was just another of those Yooper days). Having somebody (Vathsa, that is) who knew what to see and how to get to those places, helped to an extent that I cannot emphasize more. He took me to quite a few interesting places - some well known and some not so well known - mostly by walk and sometimes by Metro. WTC site, Broadway, Wall St, NYSE, the Bull, Statue of Liberty (from shore), Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Grand Central, Empire State Bldg…. were the places (as I remember) we visited and I must say, I am very impressed with the city - socio-economical flow seems to be fluent.

Lunch at Minar, a desi restaurant in the vicinity of Empire State Bldg., was rather heavy but spicy & tasty nevertheless - I couldn’t believe I had paid thrice the amount for a Mysore Masala Dosa for one third the size in Boston! Before and after lunch, for quite some time, we tried innumerable (or like Vathsa says, 3 million plus 2) times to reach Rags - to see if he could pick us up from Newark. We boarded the train to Morristown from Newark and tried 7 million plus 2 times to see if Rags could come to Morristown. Technology should have made our lives easy (atleast that’s the assumption) and Rags, for heaven’s sake, has two cellphones. I had to call Pramod (in Syracuse) to send Rags an email!! Well, nothing worked and, speaking with Latha over phone and discussing some photography issues with Vathsa were the only things that went right. Just to make the matters even worse, our train didn’t stop in Morristown and took us all the way to Dover (don’t know if this place has anything to do with Dover Publications). We took a cab and headed towards Parsippany - few good things to come out of this experience are as follows:

1. I got to shoot a longer exposure photo of a train entering the station
2. I learnt how to say I don’t know Spanish. Please excuse me in Spanish

We eventually reached Parsippany and I had no fuel left in me to join Vathsa and Rags to Atlantic City (about two hour drive). Both were kind enough to change the plans - we went to CompUSA, grocery shopping and then had dinner in yet another desi restaurant (Udupi style). After having re-packed all my stuff and discussed my NYC experience with Ramprasad, I am just about ready to sleep - I need it badly as I have to drive over 200 miles tomorrow…