The Best of New York City
We had a few days left before we flew back home, so we decided to see the sights of the best city in the world – New York.
If you haven’t been to New York, here are some handy tips about seeing New York. View New York from the top of buildings. We recommend the top of the Rockefeller located on 49th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. Go ahead a do the usual sights, such as Times Square, but be prepared that it is a very busy and do go see the Statue of Liberty (that’s busy too).
Now, for the places that are off the beaten track, we recommend the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, it has the best Japanese garden besides Japan, and it also is close to Prospect Park, which is Brooklyn’s answer to Central Park. Of course, the best time to see these sites is either in Spring or in Autumn, any other time it will be horribly hot or terribly cold.
New York City has the best restaurants you could ever hope for, we found a place in the Tribeca neighborhood called Ninja, it’s very expensive, but we really do highly recommend it. The cuisine is Japanese and the food is excellent. For something less expensive, we found a place in Queens called Astoria. This restaurant was great for being in a melting pot culturally speaking and the food is fantastic.
For great places to have a drink, we went outside Manhattan into Brooklyn’s neighborhood of Williamsburg. You can get there by jumping on the L train and get off at the first stop in Brooklyn called Bedford Avenue. There are literally hundreds of really cool bars, so the only problem you’ll have is choosing which one to go into.
If you’re in New York on a Wednesday evening, check out the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Wednesday night is amateur night at the Apollo. It’s so fun and fantastic. You can get drinks there and boo off anyone you don’t like.
New York is really the best city in the whole world and it has something to offer any day of the week and at any time of the day. It’s definitely a must for any serious traveler
02.25.10Personal Accounts of Great Property Management
What does great property management really mean? Two examples of how the same problem was handled differently may help illustrate this. In Tempe, Arizona the summer time temperatures can reach dangerous levels. One summer while in college, our swamp cooler broke. Try to spend one night sleeping in a house with an interior temperature above 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and you understand the very low comfort level. Spend three nights in that house, and you begin to fall apart. Dry heat or not, it’s like roasting in an oven. In this situation, we called the property manager who came over right away to see if he could fix the swamp cooler. After about an hour, he left, saying he’d be right back. About thirty minutes later he was back with a brand new swamp cooler.
Now, flash forward a few years…different rental property, different management company, same situation. In the middle of August the swamp cooler broke. This time, it wasn’t dry heat, it was the middle of the monsoon season. A time in Valley of the sun that many people don’t realize occurs. It’s when the humidity soars just as high as the temperatures. My roommate had an 18 month old son, so aside from our discomfort we were worried about his well-being. I called the property manager. No response. I began to call once a day, and record the time and date that I called. After 2 weeks I got a hold of him and asked if he had listened to my message. He said yes. So, I made him aware of the fact that I had a record of each time I had called, and that if we did not have cooling by that afternoon I would call a lawyer. The lawyer was my best friend, and she was livid over the situation. We did get a new swamp cooler that afternoon.
In taking care of the maintenance of a property, the manager is taking car of the people who are renting that property. It is a human thing, a caring thing. When searching for a place to live in Nova Scotia, I did a little research and found myself at a website where customers had written reviews of the TransGlobe Property Management Company. It was the human touch that everyone wrote about. It was more than the fix-it jobs done, it was that the tenants felt that the company actually did care about them. That is what great property management means, and that is why I chose to rent a place from them when I chose my apartment in Nova Scotia.
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Omnisphere in Greensboro
If you’re traveling in North Carolina, you’ll find a number of things to do during the day in Greensboro: The Arboretum, the Greensboro Historical Museum, the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. But what if you’re staying over in one of the hotels of Greensboro? What if you’re looking for something to do at night? There’s an answer, at least for Febuary 19th. The Natural Science Center’s Omnisphere is presenting a laser show, titled Laser U2, at seven, eight and nine o’clock at night, where you’ll be able to watch laser light dance and flash across the forty foot dome of the Omnisphere to the tunes of U2. Each show lasts about an hour. Based on my experiences with laserium shows in Los Angeles, this should be well worth a visit. But, of course, it’s not the only thing the Natural Science Center or the Omnisphere has to offer.
During the day, you’ll be able to see some spectacular 3-D movies at affordable rates. While schedules may change, according to the present listing at the Omnisphere, you’ll find Bugs! A Rainforest Adventure in 3-D, narrated by Academy Award winning actress Judi Dench, and Sea Monsters in 3-D, which is on a return engagement due to its popularity. Sea Monsters plays Mondays at three p.m., while Bugs! may be seen at two and four in the afternoon on Mondays to Sundays. If you arrive a little earlier in the day, you can see at one in the afternoon two features that explore astronomical sights: The Other Side of Infinity: Black Holes, and Seasonal Stargazing.
These features can be seen for six dollars for the 3-D films, and five dollars for the 2-D films; this is in addition to the admission fee to the Natural Science Center; however, if you arrive no more than fifteen minutes before showtime, then the Science Center fee is waived. However, I’d arrive even earlier and explore the exhibits of the Science Center, too. It makes for an excellent day for travelers and their families in Greensboro.
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Cape May Snow Sculpture
This was stormy, much more stormy than I had ever bargained for, and the reason I couldn’t find my way out after we found our way in had less to do with storms than it did with laziness. Or perhaps better to say it was something like resistance, that there was a tendency to avoid any kind of resistance, and this was going to become a problem. Eventually it would be a problem, anyway, because there was a direction that things were turning, and for it to turn out okay, there was going to have to be a difficult move in one direction. The easy way was always to just let it fall apart. But when you are in love with a child of the weather, you learn to do things in a very different way.
The first few meetings felt exactly like the first meetings should. They left me feeling rather giddy, lucky, and also a little bit confused. I knew there was something good going on here, just beneath the surface of things, and I could tell she thought so, too. We had a chemistry, and it worked up to a hotel reservation in Cape May, where we were going to get away from all distractions for a few days and figure out exactly what this was between us.
On the first night, we realized that we’d gotten stuck in the storm of the century, and it wasn’t going to stop snowing any time soon. The place was fantastic, with a gorgeous feeling of comfort and gloom, that we both seemed to like. Maybe we liked it too well, because I was starting to suspect that there was something more to her interest in the dark than just a lingering teenage goth rebellion. It stayed bad, and then it snowed another foot, and though this was unusual for Cape May, it wasn’t unheard of, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with the child of the weather until that night. At 2 am, I woke up, alone, and when I looked out the window, I saw her outside, on the beach below, making snow sculptures out of all the men she’d ever loved, crying to herself.
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Water Country in Williamsburg
Some days do you want to just get an inner tube and float 700 feet down a lazy river? If you’re more adventurous, how about shooting out of the top of a tower and going in one of three directions, each direction named after a different rock and roll dance (“The Hully Gully,” “The Twist,” and, my favorite, “The Funky Chicken”), two hundred feet in the air, dropping two hundred feet down, and landing in a nine thousand square inch pool? Admittedly, these two actions (floating lazily, dropping in terror two hundred feet) arise from entirely different moods, but it’s possible to want to do both at Water Country, USA, in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Wiliamsburg, VA, has so many things to do that it’s easy to lose track of them at times. There’s Busch Gardens, there’s Colonial Williamsburg, there’s ghost tours of the areas. There’s even a park that contains gigantic sculptures of the heads of past U.S. Presidents. So it may be easy to overlook the water park aspects of Williamsburg; however, I recommending finding a hotel at http://www.hotelswilliamsburg.com, make sure your accommodations are in order, and then change clothes and head for the park.
Water Country, USA, has a decidedly rock and roll theme to its park (Rock ‘n’ Roll Island’s main attraction is a thirty-three foot tall slide tower that’s named Jammin’ Juke Box), and, almost ironically, a West Coast theme: The rides include Malibu Pipeline, Hubba Hubba Highway, Big Daddy Falls, Aquazoid, Jet Scream, Nitro Racer, Rampage, and Wild Thang. Finding a ride named Malibu Pipeline on the East Coast makes sense to me. I never did understand Disney’s California Adventure theme park, which simulates what it’s like to be in California, while you’re actually in California. If you’re on the East Coast, though, sometimes you want to be where you’re not. And, when the weather’s a little warmer, the Pipeline seems like a good way to do it. Of course, right now, in the middle of winter, we’ll have to wait for this adventure. The park opens up again in May.
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A Quick Overview of Singapore
If you’ve never been to Singapore before, then you might want to take a look at what there is to do once you land on this island city-state. The city began as a Malaysian fishing village on the Singapore River. Then, in 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company established a trading post here, and it’s this small trading post that became Singapore, a cosmopolitan city of five million, where English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil are the spoken languages.
You can easily find a hotel before arrival simply by going to this website, http://www.singaporehotels.com.sg. Once you arrive, though, and settle into your hotel, what’s some of the attractions you might find? Well, Singapore has quite an abundance of animal attractions. There’s the Singapore Zoo, as well as several nature parks. For instance, the zoo offers a Night Safari, from which you can see nocturnal animals from all over the globe. There’s also Underwater World, an impressive aquarium, as well as the Jurong Bird Park and the Butterfly & Insect Kingdom. But perhaps you haven’t come to Singapore to see wild animals. You might like to pick out the landmarks of the city, such as Merlion Park or the Art House at the Old Parliament House. Sir Stamford Raffles is well represented by a number of statues. Through the center of the city, you’ll find the Singapore Rivers, which allowed for Raffles’ trading post to grow into this city. You’ll still Victorian and neo-classical Roman buildings here, dating back to the Nineteenth Century.
You’ll find a number of theme parks here, as well, but perhaps one of the most interesting is the Singapore Flyer, one of the world’s largest “observation wheels,” like the London Eye in the United Kingdom, but bigger.
Singapore has a great many parks and gardens, including the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, the Chinese Garden, the Fort Canning Park, the Singapore Botanic Garden and the East Coast Park. It’s also filled with a great many museums, one of which you might like to take a look at if you want to learn more about the history of the City of the Lion: The Singapore History Museum will take you through the life of the city dating back to the 14th Century to the present.
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Young Musician Says Goodbye to Dallas
Clark has been in a state of confusion and near dismay, if he could admit it, for nearly a year. He made up his mind that he should move to Austin from Dallas because he was trying to pursue a career in music. He was a singer/songwriter/guitarist who also played the piano. He love music and can’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t playing something. His parents frequently tell stories of him at two years old trying to climb up on the piano bench. When someone would seat him one it he would go to town on the keyboard. Of course he wasn’t actually playing anything, but sometimes it almost sounded like he was. And he could mimic the chords his mother would demonstrate for him. She was a skilled pianist and would play the piano when she was pregnant as well as play it for him he was in his crib. Most babies wake up in the middle of the night and cry to be picked up or fed, Clark would wake up and cry to hear the piano. Yes, those were stories his parents, particularly his mother, would love to tell.
Dallas was Clark’s home. He was born there and grew up in the same house in which he first arrived from the hospital. He moved out into his own apartment last year, which brought him to the greater consideration of major life circumstance needs. He loved the Dallas Cowboys and couldn’t imagine life without his weekly seafood sandwich fix at St. Pete’s Dancing Marlin. He imagined his life as a successful musician and what it would be like to someday return to Dallas and stay in one of the local hotels. He started to imagine this every time he passed one of the hotels and he started to feel like he was only there visiting. He would walk past the West End Pub and imagine himself to play there as a special appearance when he returned. Slowly he knew it was time for him to leave. He considered by Los Angeles and Austin and finally chose Austin. He even had a friend there who was willing to rent him a room. Clark prepared to announce his final decision when he was home for dinner that night.
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Great Nightclubs and BBQ in Fort Worth
Joe had no idea that traveling with his sister could be so much fun. He also had no idea that Fort Worth, Texas had so much to offer. All of these realizations occurred because his sister Amy had invited, rather asked, him to go with her when she flew to Fort Worth for a job interview. She was pursuing a career in nightclub management and wanted her brother to go with her so she could feel comfortable investigation the city’s nightclub scene. And while taking a trip with his sister was not the highest item on Joe’s list of fun activities, he couldn’t resist the free room offer at one of the luxury hotels in the Fort Worth area. In addition, Amy offered to pay for all of their expenses such as meals and entertainment and such. So, while that sealed the deal, Joe wasn’t going to take that advantage of his sister and he insisted, though reluctantly, that he pay is own way while they were there. And ultimately, after the great time he had, he was willing to pay his sister for having taken him on the trip. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but still he had a great time.
They began their nightclub adventures at the White Elephant Saloon, which is located in Fort Worth’s Stockyards area. If this was any indication of what was to come, Joe was already a fan of Fort Worth. There was a great guitar player performing the night they were there, though Joe didn’t remember his name. He did like his music though and was impressed that most of it was original. What really made his evening, however, was an amazingly beautiful woman who not only caught his attention, but returned his gaze. After deciding he had nothing to lose, Joe walked over and began talking to the woman, whose name is June. They had a great conversation and Joe ended up bringing her over to meet Amy. June ended up showing Joe the sights of Fort Worth while Amy was at her interview and then spent a lot of time with the two of them during the rest of their trip. She showed them the where they could find the best bbq in Forth Worth and although Joe was sad when they left town, he was more than happy to call June when Amy found out she got the job. Joe would be visiting his sister as often as he could.
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Venus on Broadway
For anyone who grew up thinking about shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather, New York has an elusive mystery that gets deeper the more you swim around in it. It’s one of the most exciting places to be at any given time, and moment for moment, it’s probably the best of everything. There are multiple histories of multiple cultures making up New York at the present, and one of the most obvious cultures is the one of theatre. There is a tremendous history here that makes visitors who happen to be holding tickets to a New York Broadway sense that there’s more than just a casual night on the town at stake.
When you see a play here, there is always the possibility of entering into an experience that will change your life. It’s not only in the usual ways that plays can completely change our perceptions of the world. Although, with playwrights like David Ives, who specializes in creating constructions of reality where the seams are all visible, there is always the possibility of having your world shaken up in the most delightful way. He’s one of the few living playwrights who consciously evokes some of the early avant-garde traditions, and seems to be an unusually cubist writer.
Cubist writers don’t sell plays, though. However, funny and quirky writers do, and he’s also running on that much safer ground. His new work Venus in Fur is a mind-bending adventure into representation. The play takes its title from the same book that the Velvet Underground got their song, and the themes are similar. This is less rock and roll and more theatre, however, where the conceit revolves around an audition and realities that keep breaking and bending into each other. The play might be too short or too long for some, but for those looking for a good time this week, it’s just right.
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