Nautiker

so, we're back and had a great trip - what a fantastic city that is! once more thanks to all of you, you've helped making this one as smooth as possible!

for what it's worth, I'm going to tie up some loose ends here, just in case these might be of interest to anyone. so, in chronological order from the beginning of this thread:

- steam funnels: it really was a dumb question. of course they are still around, of course it is impossible to predict where. if you walk around enough, you will get to see them (I think we had 4-5, plus a few 'smouldering' manhole covers and even once a steaming crack in the pavement)

- rooftop water towers: again, they are obviously still around. I realise now how impossible it is to describe where to go to spot them. the first one I already saw near Times Square, then a couple close to 5th Ave, loads between Chrysler and Empire State and even more around Flatiron. by comparison, the number to be spotted from the High Line was actually rather low...

- Vessel: so it re-opened right after we left. but I am not sad, I did not like it, nor that area, at all *shrugs*

- NYCT busses: we did use a few of them and they were not bad at all (esp. for crosstown, never used them as a substitute for subways though). one time they really let us down, though.

- NYC ferry: what a wonderful way to get around. turned out you can split and share the 10ride-tickets just as you want, like a carnet on the Paris metro - maybe the best bargain in town!

- luxury cars: oh boy, my boy got spoiled!! (I would need to elaborate on this)

- airport transfer/Metrocard: went smooth. (during our six days, I racked up 12 subway, 4 bus and 2 Roosevelts, some of our group slightly less, yet the tickets definitely paid off.) and indeed, we could use the airtrain 10ride-ticket multiple times - so from two persons doing a return trip onwards it's a deal already - crazy, but I am not the one doing the rules/prices...

- famous building lobbies: I was surprised just where one could just walk in, e.g. Chrysler Building. Woolworth Building, on the other hand, made it quite clear with a signpost that they do not enjoy any tourists dropping by...

still working on that 'reverse jet-lag' back home here and doing a bit of daydreaming about all those places we did not make it to and which will have to wait for our next visit...

TDudette

Glad it worked out, Nautiker. Where to next?!

Nautiker

I should say: NY again, of course, but scheduled is a week in Evolène/Valais after Christmas and drafting commenced on a fortnight in Scotland around Easter (Europe branch looks very savvy on that topic)...

Nautiker

back again once more here - not sure whether you are interested in a trip report about a place you all know so well, however I currently need a distraction and maybe some of you need, too...

Day One, October 14th

We (reminder: family of four + MIL + SIL) started from Frankfurt at 9am, aboard a Singapore Airlines 777. Right after take-off the plane took us on a quick spin around the city centre of Frankfurt to remind us one last time what a German 'skyline' looks like:


(and as you probably know, Frankfurt sometimes refers to itself as 'Mainhattan' (due to its location on the river Main) - most people rather jokingly, the local tourist board however with a straight face).

For me and the kids (g13, b10), it was our first intercontinental flight, and what to say: it was both exciting and dull. I prefer trains but this was not an option this time around. Beautiful clouds, though.



I was aware that it would have been mostly water anyway, yet we got a peek of Newfoundland in the rising sun, which looked beautiful, like droplets of quicksilver on a dark ground - I could not adequately catch it with my rubbish phone cam, this is the best I got



Then it was all clouds again until right before landing - our first glimpse of the United States!



Arrival was around 11am and we found the immigration check (wholly contrary to our fears) almost deserted, ours was the only flight at that moment - we breezed through it in like 15mins, past a friendly and smiling (thorough nevertheless) officer. We got to the baggage belt before it even started moving.

On the Airtrain, getting a first, distant glance of Manhattan, I was astonished a) just how spread out the city is (well, one knows, but one just does not imagine what it looks like in real life) and b) how easy it was to tell apart the different buildings even from this far away (starting on the left with Brooklyn Tower and WTC, then the 'great plains' of the Villages, the new Hudson Yards on the right behind the hangar, the light limestone of the Empire State, then the massive new JP Morgan Chase with one of those pencil towers furthest to the right - nah, I cannot discern _all_ buildings!)
I love _any_ ride from an airport into a city. Even if it is just moments, it gives a tiny insight into a world one hardly ever gets to know otherwise...


"A skyscraper's kindergarten" my kids joked:



Well, except for the petrol truck, this looks alomst exactly like Köln-Porz (15mins from where we live) - did we really travel all the way for this?



travel downtown was swift and hassle free and so easy thanks to all your tips on here. so, first time coming up the subway stairs, blinded by the bright sky, there really was that feeling of (joyful) overwhelming that I had hoped to feel. complete awe. what. an. unique. experience. I don't know whether you locals do still experience your city this way, I sincerely hope you can. it's impossible to catch this moment in picture and vain and trite to describe it in words (at least I couldn't do it interestingly), so we have to just accept it it will resonate with me for a very, very long time (or is it 'very long, long time'?).

next thing I notice is that I, generally interested in architecture, have never given much thought about what kind of buildings Manhattan is actually made of. sure, there are famous old buildings and famous new buildings, some of arguable acclaim, but the rest? I never made up my mind. so, just turning around the corner into 40th st, I already get a great view of what lies ahead:


The sleek glass curtain wall facade left of the middle belongs to the 1961 Spring Mills Building, an early international style high-rise. what a beauty! same goes for the building next to it, the 1913 World Tower, with its richly decorated and carefully restored terra-cotta fronts. Funny to imagine that once it stood out highly above its neighbours - well, guess that's valid for many buildings in New York... (and yes, obviously I had to look up both buildings, otherwise I wouldn't have been surprised!) I never realised there would be this variety, range and depth in style and quality basically wherever I stepped! What a delight!

quite in contrast, our hotel (right on the right of the World Tower in a deep, deep ravine, you cannot see it on this pic) had the dullest and most banal appearance one could imagine. I really wanted to take a picture but got bored trying. if you like, check streetview...

I won't go into detail about the hotel. it was an hotel. nothing wrong, friendly staff, clean rooms, a little make-up wouldn't harm. we selected it for its location and it was very good at that, imo. mind-bogglingly expensive from our point of view, though, but one of the cheapest places in Midtown that fit the travel standards of my MIL. ;-)

so, short rest stop here, will continue later.

Nautiker

oh, and if anyone knows how to mark this a trip report now: help kindly appreciated

nycguy10002

Great photos. I am glad you had a good time during your visit (and I can't wait to hear more).

I don't think you can mark a thread which started as a question as a Trip report later on. You could start a new thread, copy your photos etc and select the trip report option OR just keep posting here and everyone will know what you are getting at.

[P.S. - You have 7,650 views on this thread so far which is very impressive for the topic - and in a relatively short time. Most NYC questions barely make it to over 1,000 views].

Moderator1

We used your new posts to create a new Trip Report thread.

Nautiker

thanks, mods!

(I wouldn't have minded keeping the rest of the thread, though, if alone for context. so, anyone interested in the built-up to this, here is the link: Visiting NYC with family/kids, October 2024 )

and thanks for the thumbs up, nycguy. it's difficult for me to assess the #views, but I noticed they stuck out compared to some other threads (and I am still baffled that there are so few NYC threads at all...): my guess would be that 'New York + kids' is a frequent search term in general and thus generated some traffic - too bad, since though this is a trip _with_ kids, I fear it will be of limited use to other families, since we travelled with a rather standard tourists POV. maybe I should try to change the header *shrugs*

well, lets carry on.

from touch-down at JFK until crossing the treshold of our hotel it had barely taken us 2.5 hours, so this left us an ample chunk of the afternoon for a first look-around. another thing I had not considered is how compact Midtown Manhattan actually is. when we stepped outside on the street we were like: 'oh, down there is the NYT-Building already, so Times Square must be even closer, the Bank of America Building is just behind this block here and if we decide to set off in the other direction it's barely 10mins until we reach Grand Central Terminal!' it really is one big open-air museum!

futile attempt trying to catch the atmosphere: colours, bustle, noise, overpowering architecture. I've grown up in a reasonably sized city (~700.000 inhabitants), alas now living in lower-density, rather rural metropolitan area (community has a population less than 50.000), I really felt like a hayseed here (the German word would be 'Landei' ('farm egg'), my dictionary tells me hayseed comes closest: slightly pejorative, yet not outright offensive ;-) )


our boy likes the 'Spiderman' movies and we had watched them again as a 'preparation' to this trip, however I hadn't been aware this is one of the places featured, I took this picture just because the situation looked so typical. when we came by again later there was a queue around the corner of the block...


obviously we were close to Times Square now. obviously it was really busy with tourists, however I am not sure whether we were not actually outnumbered by superheroes... I am usually reluctant taking pics of people, yet I could not resist trying a snap of Spiderman helping King Kong putting on his costume
(it's weak, but it works as an aide-mémoire for me). I wonder how these people make money nowadays. do they get paypalled? contactless? we made the whole trip practically cashless, there would have been nothing we could have offered them...



tourists doing what tourists do: taking pictures of snack stalls...




M&M was a default stop for the kids and I made some default pics, e.g. this one ($10 for 1/2 pound? at home I can get a full kilo at that price, and we have had inflation, too! )



BTW, this is what I meant in an earlier post: elevated, non-typical viewpoint, in this case from the 3rd floor of the M&M store - not a panoramic bird's eye-view, but not a standard streetview level, either. I like that.


on towards Rockefeller now, but Avenue of the Americas first. despite all those famous skyscrapers, this is actually what transports the most heavy 'New York'-vibes for me: 'countless', 'anonymous' high-rises blocking out the sky with a sort of casualness/naturalness that I only associate with Manhattan (and of course they are not anonymous but by Wallace Harrison, they just happen to be less famous):



my phone camera might be crap, but if you try hard enough, you can gloss over its shortcomings with an occasional 360°-panorama now and then



time for another short break

esm

Great report, looking forward to more.

schmerl

Wonderful report. It's so nice to see our cities through someone else's eyes.

Nautiker

thanks for the feedback! indeed, looking at other people's trip reports does often open up a different point of view to me (sometimes it works, sometimes it does not)

I'll spare you the pics of Rockefeller Center (street level), however the restrooms in the basement I found noteworthy, in the sense of witnessing a real life manifestation of an ongoing international developement I so far only experienced as a theoretical debate (I'm not going to discuss, though):



we are on 5th Ave now, looking at Saks, and I am once again contemplating the casual patriotism of the United States. the German Bundestag parliament building has five (big) national flags (four on its towers plus one big flagpole) and I cannot think of another building in Germany that might have more, but maybe I am just not thinking hard enough...




meanwhile, and much more exciting: our first (albeit faint) manhole-steam!




and I am really sad I visited too late (by a couple of years...) to experience those classical Crown Victoria cabs/police cars - this one got closest, but I wasn't fast enough, so just scroll on (maybe I will use AI to complete the picture... )



another 'sight' I had been determined to track down were those typical rooftop watertowers. we had the first one close to Times Square already, but it didn't make a decent motif. we got more luck close to a razed building site between 46th and 47th (if you're counting five water you are still missing one!)




and one more thing I hadn't realised: just how much building/demolishing/renovating there would be permanently going on. it felt like there was hardly a single street without some scaffoldings, pedestrian redirections, construction site fences etc. eyecatcher was, of course, the new JP Morgan Chase by Norman Foster. I really like the x-bracing, it's so bold and I enjoy being able to 'read' some of a building's statics. imo you cannot help but instantly consider it a reference to Fazlur Rahman Khan's Hancock Tower in Chicago, which I am perfectly fine with. this said, the building is really, really massive, I wonder how locals look at its impact on the skyline? (slightly cheating here: the pic is clearly taken from Times Square, since when we were on 5th Ave, it was just too close...)



on the other hand, just a few steps further south... any KPF fans on here? hopefully not. no. no, no, no. no! you just cannot put fake arches on a 21st century skyscraper. it's plain awful. who thought this would be a good idea? but then I am biased, I struggle to think of _any_ KPF building I like. what an eyesore!




fortunately, this is Manhattan, so it's just another few steps on to this gem: 1953 Manufacturers Trust Company Building by SOM - maybe the prettiest post-war building in Manhattan that is not a high-rise? most of SOM nowadays I have a hard time enjoying, it's just too much standard investor's stuff, but this one really is a milestone. if I am not mistaken, there was not very much going on in Manhattan from the mid-thirties onwards, so if you compare this building to e.g. the Rockefeller Center, you realise what a giant leap in terms of architecture you can witness here. so glad it has been landmarked! (however ironically, despite being only a stone's throw away from our hotel, I never managed to return for a closer visit during our stay, well, that's travel dynamics. next time!):




it's roughly 5pm now. we got up at 5am today - alas 6 hours farther to the east! naturally, the kids are totally spent, especially since we have walked like 6kms this afternoon. we know that it's recommended to adapt as quickly as possible to a new time zone, but we don't want to force them any further. when they hit the bed around 7pm, it's 1am in Germany already. our rooms hadn't been ready when we arrived just after noon, so it'a a great (and welcome) surprise when we discover we can see the Empire State from our window (sure, there are likely more spectacular views available, but we are not going to complain! probably cost quite a number of Karma points already...). End of Day 1 (where's the 'star eyes'-emoji? I cannot find it!)

Fra_Diavolo

Really enjoying seeing the city through your eyes.

nycguy10002

Don't put yourself down on picture taking - your cellphone pictures came out great.

I do agree with others that it is good to hear different points of view of Manhattan. When you live in or work NYC (I am talking of the City of NY as the five boroughs of which Manhattan is one - Manhattan is known as NY County for State of NY official records which is why when many people hear NYC they thing of Manhattan right away). I live in the Bronx (one of the 5 boroughs) which is just northeast of Manhattan and although I am retired I come into Manhattan quite often), after a while you tend to just accept what is there as "being there" and while you might take notice of something it may not stand out as something extra special (until it might come up in conversation).

In regard to your comment on the costumed characters in Times Square "I wonder how these people make money nowadays. do they get paypalled? contactless? we made the whole trip practically cashless, there would have been nothing we could have offered them..."
- These individuals are "independent operators" and work strictly for tips. Their presence while allowed is not sanctioned by the City Of NY (in fact there are those who consider them a nuisance but it could be considered as freedom of speech under the U.S. Constitution. The companies who own the copyrights on the characters don't bother to take legal action because it would take too long and cost a lot) . They are required to keep moving around and not stay in any one spot for too long (to avoid being accused of loitering). Any tipping by the public who take photos with them is strictly voluntary (there have been rare instances where the person did not get a tip and got a bit violent - that usually makes the TV news).

I am glad you were able to see some water towers as they are slowly vanishing as older buildings get torn down and are being replaced by modern skyscrapers.(such as the situation in the photo you took of 5th Avenue between 46th & 47th Streets).

Ah, Avenue of the Americas - call it what you will, but to a NYer it will always be 6th Avenue.

I want to add my thanks to the Mods for doing the "cut and paste" action in creating the trip report thread for you.

Please continue.

Fra_Diavolo

In case anyone wants more information on water towers. https://blog.americanpipeandtank.com...y-water-towers

Nautiker

naah, I am quite happy with the motifs, but the technical quality of the pics (focus, brightness etc) is just rubbish. or perhaps I am just discontent with the personal decline of my aspiration towards photography, given I started on high ambitions roughly 30years ago, with my own 2nd-hand manual Nikon FM, arranging with my arts teacher for the opportunity to use the school's photo lab in the afternoon to make my own b&w-copies, pondering which gradation of paper would suit best, carefully weighing my budget on the limited number of 35mm film I could afford etc, nowadays shooting an unlimited number of pics from my hip with lens and autofocus I would always have considered disgusting is just a weird development. or maybe I am just jealous that my SIL with her state-of-the-art iphone-pics' and carefree approach of point-and-shoot often look lengths the better... *shrugs*

good thing I am not gambling on numbers, nycguy, I would have bet that 10002 is your zipcode - but then maybe it once was? *laughs*

those superhero impersonators depress me. considering the sky-high costs of living, it should be impossible for them to make a living. we were approached by a sort-of Captain America a couple of days later and he left us his business card with all sorts of paypal details etc, maybe even a gofundme, I cannot recall in detail - but this cannot be a healthy basis for survival. or can it? it reminds me of poorer countries, where well-educated professionals like teachers or healthcare workers flock to the tourist industry where there is better pay as guides or chambermaids, but in a rich country like the US, there should be better paying jobs available even for the unskilled than entertaining tourists for tips?

fradiavolo - enjoyed your link about the watertowers. much appreciated!

Nautiker

it's late/early over here, yet I will just kick-off with

Day Two, October 15th

anyway. woke up around 2am, which would have been 8am at home, actually rather late for me. so far I have never travelled more than +1/-1 timezones in my whole life, so time shift is really something I am unfamiliar with. tried to sleep again but didn't work. contemplated getting up and explore the city while it sleeps - would have done so instantly in case I had been younger and travelling without family, but not taking any chances this time. hoped to hear police car-sirens wailing in the distance, like in the movies, but it was just a quiet night, so eventually listened to the garbage collection passing by 18 stories below instead...

we were doing self-catering, so a decent bakery next to Bryant Park was a big plus for us:



remember I told you about our hotel's facade 'yesterday'? I couldn't help it, I just had to look it up and screenshot it for you:




daytime view from our window down on 39th St, 18 stories above the sidewalk (floor was labelled 19th but they really left out the 13th - I thought this was an urban legend!). rare chance to get a view of the city without perspective distortion ('stürzende Linien' / 'plunging lines' in German). not much of a looker yet actually, I like this pic a lot. (and: six more water towers in this pic!!)



our boy is a big Tesla [car] fan currently, so I thought it would be a great joy to point out the 'Tesla [genius person] corner' so very close to our hotel to him, alas he was only mildly impressed (admittedly, electricity _is_ mysterical and hard to understand for most of us, including me, thus it is difficult to appreciate accordingly...) (and did you notice the greenish 1973 Salesforce Tower in the background? it's by Ely Kahn, who, while she was working in his office as research for her 'Fountainhead'-novel, introduced Ayn Rand to Frank Lloyd Wright - well, this was much earlier than that high-rise, obviously)
tourists doing what tourists do, part #35647: a subway entrance! funnily, in places like London, Paris or New York, public transport has made the cut being considered a sight in its own right - most other cities are still working on that!

and did I mention we had fantastic weather throughout our stay? though it got much warmer again after we left, we could not complain at all. fantastic contre-jour atmosphere in Bryant Park:




would have loved to spend all day there with a good book and a thermos bottle of tea...


when I was a kid, my father had a superb coffee-table book by (German) photographer Reinhart Wolf, who had specialised in large format (8x10) photography. the book was about 'portraits' of New York high-rises, focusing on the very tips of the buildings we so often hardly get to see up close. one of those buildings was the fantastic 1923 American Radiator Building, I was so very happy to get to see it, even if it was just from street-level:



well, tired now, need some sleep...

nycguy10002

Those bakery items in the photo are enough to put anyone off their diet (if they are on one).

In regard to the 10002 in my member name - no I have never lived in that zip code (the Lower East side of Manhattan). I have been using nycguy10002 for a long time (even before I joined the Fodor's community). I was a member of another travel forum that no longer exists and I just chose nycguy off the top of my head and had to add something afterwards to make it somewhat unique (someone had already taken nycguy). The numbers were somewhat random (although I knew that 100 is the prefix for zip codes in Manhattan). The 101xx and 102xx series are assigned to buildings/businesses in Manhattan (in addition to one in the 100xx series) that receive a lot of mail on a daily basis - it makes the electronic sorting at the post offices and subsequent delivery go easier). 10001 seemed to have been taken by someone else so I I just went up one to 10002. My own zip code is in the 104xx series which is assigned to the Bronx (the last 2 digits represent a 'zone' where there is a local post office from where they deliver mail for addresses in their local area. Brooklyn is 112xx, Queens is 114xxx, Staten Island is 103xx. There are other zip codes in the 110xx, 111xx assigned to businesses/buildings in other boroughs like is done in Manhattan.

To NYers those costumed characters are more of an annoyance than anything else. We tend to walk by them and barely give them a glance. There is one person, however who does get a lot of attention. I don't know if you saw him when you were walking in Times Square - "The Naked Cowboy". He is easy to spot as he is tall, wears nothing but a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and white underwear (briefs) and carries and plays a guitar. He is in his 50's now but started way back in 1999 and at first no one knew what to make of him (as no one had ever 'dressed' that way to appear in public there before). After a while people started to line up to get their picture taken with him (for tips of course) and he became something of a local celebrity and can be considered a part of the experience of Times Square. He even went so far as to copyright his likeness. More info and a picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Cowboy

Nice photos of Bryant Park (even the subway entrance). Just a bit of history - from 1842 to the 1890s the land now occupied by Bryant Park and the NY Public Library building (on the 5th Avenue side) was originally the site of the Croton Distributing Reservoir supplying water to NYC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croton...ting_Reservoir

I like the photo you took from your hotel room. Most people (myself included) never look up at the sides pf buildings as we walk by (you probably noticed that NYers tend to walk at a faster pace than most).

Looking forward to your next days activities.

janisj

What a fun report -- thanks for posting.

The rest of the thread is still in place, it didn't go anywhere.

That's how the forums work: Someone posts one or more threads asking for ideas and suggestions. And then when the trip is over they post a Trip Report' thread sort of as a pay it forward

Madam397

Agree that most NY'ers, myself included consider the costumed characters to be more than a nuisance, as well as the guys trying to sell you bus tours every block, and of course unless going to a show or getting tickets for a show, avoid Times Square like the plague.

For future travelers - Saks has a great women's restroom. It is relocated now, but it used to have the best views of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

Nautiker

we got spared the cowboy!

I guess if I lived in NYC, I would give Times Square a wide berth whenever possible. as a visitor, it was interesting, albeit unbearable pretty quickly.

the bustour/boattrip/musical ticket touts were a nuisance, imo a minor one though, since they are usually not obtrusive. and again, I have pity with them: my guess would be they get paid on commission only(?), it must be desperate trying to make a living from this. on day 4, we took the Staten Island ferry and while walking towards the terminal from Bowling Green, the street was literally lined with touts. the last one attempted to approach us when we were on the brink of entering the building and I thought like: 'guy, you _must_ know we have gotten past dozens of your colleagues already to get this close to the ferry - what are you hoping for?')

nycguy10002 fascinating to read about that reservoir, I didn't know artificial reservoirs this size existed. and it means you can have 'ancient' excavations even in Manhattan! (I know, there are a few more in the Financial District)

what other forum had you been on? I recognize a handful of handles from Thorntree, yet if I recall correctly, these guys/gals have always been 'dual-citizens'. but then I stuck mostly to the Europe-branches there, thus far from getting to know a lot of them.

Madam397 ohh, though I would not have been able to go to this specific one, I just love toilets with a view! e.g. the men's toilets on the sailing vessel/youth hostel 'Chapman' in Stockholm have a fantastic view of the royal castle and there is a youth hostel toilet in Oyndarfjørður on the Faroe Islands with a view of the fjord/sea that makes you want to sit for a long time...
toilets, in general, should be given much more priority in architecture. some famous architecs give it barely a thought, e.g. the new Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg by Herzog/deMeuron: they always put so much thought in any detail and all the materials, but here: awful (at least the few there are in the public area), not better than a highway reststop. or Calatrava: his toilets are most often very mundane, too, one would really expect better, considering his extravagant style! I could elaborate!

well, let's carry on

as mentioned before, it's indeed just a short stroll from our hotel/Bryant Park to Grand Central Terminal. to think they intended to knock it down!

and they still have elevators with mechanical floor indicators (or what do you name them?)! I think I have only ever seen them in b&W-movies...




another thing I didn't knew: that there are two sets of tracks, a more elegant upper level...

...and a slightly eerie lower level. (before posting this, I wondered for a moment whether American tourists would post pictures of German commuter trains on this board, but then I checked and: they do!)



outside on Lexington: our first 'full-size' steam vent! ticked off the list!





again, this city is so compact: just another shortest of strolls across Lexington Ave to Chrysler Building




when I entered, at once I had a concierge at my side who explained to me where I was allowed to amble and where not: firmly, but very friendly at the same time. he then pointed out not to forget looking upside for the beautifully decorated ceiling (alas pic turned out rubbish )

my wife says she likes this one better in b&w, however I think the somber colours and alabastrine lights are essential to this era, almost the same inside Rockefeller and to some extent even Empire State. funny, that there was a time when 'dark', 'pressed' and ornamented was so prevalent, and only a few years later architecture took such a complete turnaround...


next destinations on our list were Empire State and Flatiron, for some reason we opted againt the subway and walked instead: good decision, as it turned out.

bear with me, just one more time: 600 3rd Ave by Emery Roth & Sons from 1971. I just love those slabs. my guess would be that if it is something that impressed you when you were a kid, it sticks with you, even when at a closer look the architecture is not that special. *shrugs*




certainly one of the greatest things when you travel is that you can pretend not to understand the language, even if you know a few shreds: 'frozen custard fries'? wonder what they taste like.. (or is this a thing?)