We had breakfast once again at the Bagel Point Café, then walked out to the East River along quiet leafy streets with rows of brownstone apartments along the rough cobbled pavements. We walked over the impressive Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, with the skyscrapers of the downtown precincts framed by the huge web of the bridge cables, which seemed to form a cage with the city inside.
We turned right at the end of the bridge and walked into Chinatown. The streets were crowded with shoppers and sightseers, and every shop echoed scenes remembered from China. Fresh vegetables, cheap plastic charms and toys, fish and meat shops with flattened Peking ducks hanging in the windows, and everywhere the press of humanity. I bought a set of bao dong balls from a small shop for $6.99, and Linda bought me a silk tie.
We wandered the labyrinth of the Chinatown streets, and gradually Chinese shops gave way to the Italian shops of Little Italy. Amusement stores, pizza joints, operatic cassettes and dark, moustachioed men filled the streets, and snippets of conversation in Italian replaced the sights and sounds of Chinatown.
We lunched on pizzas and Cokes at a sidewalk stand, then set off back through Chinatown to the subway station beneath the Federal court buildings where Dan had arranged to meet us. We said goodbye to Dan and caught the train back to Brooklyn. At the apartment, we packed up and showered, then walked up to the Bergen Street subway station where we boarded the A-train to JFK.
As we travelled through the city and its outskirts, we watched the endless houses of New York roll past: filthy-looking buildings smeared with graffiti and litter strewn about everywhere. I thought of the song by Christie McColl which goes, “From the uptown apartment to a knife on the A-train, it’s not that far.” At JFK we had a two-hour wait for our flight, so we hung around the departure lounge watching people while sitting in one of the rows of pressed plastic armchairs.
CurseOfTheTraveller 