Continue reading Glimpses of Christmas Eve in Manhattan
Glimpses of Christmas Eve in Manhattan
Category Archives: Travel and Photo
Central Park and Columbus Circle this week
It is about 0° Centigrade/32° Fahrenheit. Since we are at a loose end we decide to take a stroll in Central Park. It’s the kind of harsh, winter day when the brightness of the sun belies the ferocity of the cold. Continue reading Central Park and Columbus Circle this week
Summer at last in NYC
Today was rainy but it’s Summer at last in the city. Days are longer, people are less huddled on the streets and the buildings of Manhattan get to show themselves off dazzling those who have the leisure to look up.
Holiday lights in Manhattan
Yesterday we thought it would snow. The sky turned as gray as slate, the sunlight dimmed, the ducks took shelter under the piers, the water of the river looked like a solid mass.
In short, life seemed like the cloud before the silver lining except that the silver lining never really came. No snow really happened.
A little bit of solid snow fell from the sky which you could spot if you looked carefully at a dark patch. The little snow was blown around helter-skelter in a way that you could tell it wasn’t rainwater. Enough to check off the list of some earnest young holiday tourist in these parts who could say seen snow in NYC–check on his notebook.
Continue reading Holiday lights in Manhattan
How Hurricane Sandy passed through our town
Sandy came and went and left a lot of devastation in its wake. We were more fortunate than many in my locality in Jersey City, New Jersey. We mostly observed the storm from the windows with almost no interruption in power or any other discomfort.
Many of my friends don’t have power yet. Many are throwing away food from their freezers after three days of no power and many spent the night in the cold despite diesel generators. Many intersections in our neighbourhood don’t have lights yet and the road along the river to Hoboken from our side is still cordoned off. The Manhattan skyline looks quite different from its usual bright self with a long, dark section in the middle across the river. The Verrazano-Narrows bridge looks half suspended by an invisible thread from the edge of the river upto the middle of the Hudson since only half of it is lighted and the rest of it has no light. Continue reading How Hurricane Sandy passed through our town
Signs of Toronto
When a city is walkable, there’s always people. And when there are people, they’re always saying something. It’s the din and the noise and the hustle and the bustle that make you remember you’re part of something bigger, something more than yourself.
Being elbowed painfully in a crowd rushing to office or having the end of a high heel ram into your big toe can jolt you out of that reverie and cut you down to size too.
A city can be impersonal. A city can be lonely.
But sometimes, a voice reaches out from the crowd, a sign stands out that’s distinctive in some way. The distinction tells you there’s a person behind the words, a thinking mind somewhere, someone trying to talk, to imagine, to speak in a way that goes just a little bit beyond the utilitarian purpose of what the sign is meant for.
That’s the urban poet for me. Continue reading Signs of Toronto
Text and nature at Niagara Falls
We got into the car last week and drove off and kept driving until we reached the Niagara Falls. Took about ten hours but never mind. We were rewarded for enduring the heat and the scorching sun:
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