Over the Brooklyn Bridge

A couple of months ago I had a job interview.  There was one other candidate and we got chatting while we were waiting.  She had just returned from a round the world trip so was telling me about that, and I was telling her about my upcoming holiday to New York (which kind of paled into insignificance in the face of her solo globe trotting, but never mind).  She told me that I absolutely had to walk the Brooklyn Bridge while I was there as it was the best thing she did when she visited.  So it was duly added to my list of things to do, and as I had heard kind of cool things about Brooklyn I proposed we spend a day in the neighbourhood rather than getting the subway all the way down there just to walk over the bridge.  Unfortunately the weather on our Brooklyn day was cold and drizzly so our planned trips to local parks were quickly aborted and we headed to the Brooklyn Museum just so we could keep warm and dry!  It was a real unexpected delight, with some more of the period rooms I enjoyed so much at the Met, a great collection of Egyptian stuff to keep Christine entertained, and a super cool ‘visible storage’ centre which had Tiffany lamps and 1950s appliances all stacked up in this futuristic storage facility.  I could have spent  all day in there!  Sadly this is the only picture of it which survived but you get an idea of it.  Incidentally, did I tell you that I accidentally deleted all my photos two days after I got home and only managed to recover about 60% of them?  No?  It is still quite painful to talk about.

We finally decided to brave the outdoors in the afternoon, and steeling ourselves with venti Starbucks takeaways we approached the bridge with much apprehension and quite a bit of grim determination.  It felt like something I had to do, because the girl at the interview had been so enthusiastic and insistent about it, but the prospect of walking over a bridge in the cold and damp was really not appealing.  Christine was being polite but it was pretty clear she felt the same.  But once we got up there – wow! – it was so worth it.  I can’t quite put my finger on what was so brilliant about it, but we were both definitely glad that we persevered.  The views of Manhattan were amazing, and I think there was something about the fact that everyone up there was doing the same thing, all of us taking this journey in spite of the miserable weather to see the famous skyline, to see the city, and to be able to say we had walked the Brooklyn Bridge.  There is something pretty cool about that.

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