A day of queuing in New York...

Today Nick and I split up. He wanted to go to the Empire State building (and I was not standing in those queues again!) among other places while I wanted to go to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (he was quite happy to see them from the free Staten Island ferry).

It was Saturday and they were doing work on some of the sections of the subway lines so it took forever to get down to South Ferry. By the time I eventually got there I was much later than I wanted to be but the queues for tickets weren’t that bad so I was quite relieved. I became a bit more concerned when they announced that there were no more tickets left for getting into the statue of Liberty museum then I went to stand in the line for the actual ferry and I realized why! It was one of the longest lines I’ve ever seen. It took us an hour and a half before we got to go through security and board the ferry. Craziness! Coincidentally the lady standing behind me in the line was originally from South Africa although she’s lived in the USA for the past 20 years.

Eventually we headed off for Liberty Island. Lady Liberty is really impressive up close – she’s huge! In some ways I was really glad I couldn’t go into the museum – the line for that on the island was also nuts! So I was quite happy to admire the statue, read about her history and construction, admire the views of Manhattan and then head off to Ellis Island.

Ellis Island is where the majority of immigrants to the USA were processed before being allowed in. They've restored it and turned it into a museum where you can see the long and fairly arduous process that people had to go through before being admitted to the US. It was all very interesting although I think it's probably more relevant and moving for Americans with immigrant ancestors. What I found very interesting was the fac that they said this was the largest human migration ever in History!

I then had to queue again to get a ferry back to NY and by this stage I was exhausted! Everything had also taken much longer than I had anticipated (it was already 5pm) and I was sick of standing in queues so I just went back to the hostel and had a quiet night in reading Shantaram (by Gregory David Roberts - I highly recommend it if you haven't read it)