Okay, so I’m staring to get the hang of the trains (what everyone here calls the subway) and thinking to myself that one really and truly does not need a car in the city–how cool is that? It takes like 10-15 minutes to get from my apartment door to the front door of the school via train. So, classes start at 9:30; I’ll play it safe and leave at 8:50, no problem.
A problem. There was a massive amount of rain last night (actually it woke me up a couple of times) and some of the tunnels flooded. Flooded tunnels mean no trains.
So today is the first day of actual class and I’ve been in the city for exactly 4 days, which is more than enough time to learn the sub system, but not enough time for me to have a back-up plan. Completely beside ourselves that the ubiquitous train is not longer at our beck-and-call, my flat-mate and I try to hail a cab, so as not to be late on the first day. Of course, everyone else in Brooklyn is also thinking the same thing. As that fails and the minutes tick away, we attempt to catch a bus into Manhattan. We manage to find the bus stop and even the bus number that will take us into the city (B51), but there is no bus. Several other busses come by, all for different routes, some of them several times. By this point there are enough people waiting for the mythical B51 to fill three empty busses.
We are already late, and are no more than a half dozen blocks from the residence. We saw a ‘Water Taxi‘ down by the Brooklyn Bridge, so we decide to try that. After hoofing it about a dozen blocks to catch the Water Taxi and looking at the schedule, we find that we apparently just missed one and there will not be another one for about 45 minutes.
Now there is nothing else for it… on the positive side, I now know exactly how long it takes to walk from Brooklyn Heights to TriBeCa (about 50 minutes). Not only that, but I’m one of only several million who can say they’ve walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Needless to say I missed the first 90 minutes of the first class on the first day. 🙁
