I have an uncanny knack of always, pretty much without exception, walking in the wrong direction of my destination. In fact I sometimes start walking in the right direction, second guess myself and end up in the wrong direction. So it was no surprise to me that when I headed out to Central Park last Sunday, I instead ended up downtown on the Brooklyn bridge. Per usual form I actually started walking in the right direction, looked behind me and saw what I thought was the Empire State Building and flipped a U. It was in fact the Woolworth Building (I think) and not the Empire State Building, in my feeble defense I didn’t have a map (too cheap and too self-confident in my navigational abilities) and both buildings are really tall.

I ended up wandering around on the Brooklyn Bridge trying to take artsy pictures of passing cars and people before deciding to give Ground Zero a visit. I was a bit apprehensive simply because of the abundance of heavily armed policemen everywhere, some of whom gave me very speculative looks. They were the kind of looks that made me think they had been promised an exceptionally large Christmas bonus if they hit a quota of brown fellas they pulled in for a short across to Guantanamo and they were trying  to figure out how much of a fuss I would put up before coming quietly.

I realized soon that there was a more rational explanation for the preponderance of cops on the streets and that was that old Dubaya was visiting Ground Zero. Of course no presidential visit would be complete without some kind of protest and there was plenty of this. One bunch of protestors wanted the troops home from Iraq, while the rest were trying to convince everyone that 9/11 was a conspiracy theory. It was all very exciting and people gave way to me once I pulled my camera out, probably because the white 70-200 F4 L lens I had on looked pretty professional. Matters got even more exciting when it came nearer to the time Bushie was supposed to turn up and the cops decided to do some (civilized) crowd control. I was like a kid in a candy shop at this point, people yelling, cops gesturing a remote chance of a rubber bullet in the buttocks and me playing photojournalist through it all.

Then I took this picture of an agent.

 

That look just chilled me to the bone. I had visions of being bundled into an orange jumpsuit and a black plastic bag over my head, while they flew me back and forth across the Baltic pulling my fingernails out at every stopover. And to be honest, orange just isn’t my colour. I gallantly decided that discretion was the better part of valour at this point and made a strategic retreat back to mid-town Manhattan to the vastly safer occupation of being an accidental tourist. The rest of my day was spent rather tamely on top of the Empire State Building taking innumerable pictures and then over in Jersey at an Aunt’s place for dinner. Await pics and more details about the wonderfulness that is NY!