Random Toys"R"Us queue... of doom!

When we walked past the Toys"R"Us in Times Square this morning, there were people queuing up outside the store, waiting for it to open. There was no new toy or game device that was coming out today, so I found this phenomenon particularly odd. Apparently this happens every day. I guess it's just another one of those crazy things that Times Square brings out in people. It's kinda like those lights that dazed me last night - I think the effect carried onto today, because I was getting very lost in terms of navigation, which is something I'm usually good at. Thankfully, Liza was there to set me straight. By the end of the day, the positions were reversed, and Liza started getting lost.

The day began with a storm, which in turn had began the night before. We got up early to try to get cheap tickets to a Broadway show and were greeted by light precipitation, and a excessively long line for the ticket office at Times Square, which had not yet opened (this happened at around about the time we saw that pointless queue for Toys"R"Us). We decided that we got there too late, and waiting in line would waste our time, so instead we went to hunt for a reasonably priced digital camera to replace my now defunct Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T3.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 was what I had set out to find. It had appealed to me for two reasons - Panasonic's image stabilization system, since I have shaky hands, and the 10x optical zoom, which is pretty amazing for a compact digital camera. The first shop we went to didn't have any, and the second one didn't let us test out the camera (which I wanted to do to see if it was any good). Before searching for any more stores, we decided we'd check out the Statue of Liberty.

We didn't actually go to the statue. Instead of paying to go there, we were cheap and just caught the free ferry to Staten Island, which gave a pretty clear and close (enough) view of the copper lady also known as Liberty Enlightening the World. It was still cloudy when we caught the ferry, but the statue could still be seen clearly. We didn't spend any time on Staten Island, immediately making our way back to the return ferry once we got off the first one.

Our next stop was Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center buildings. I won't lie... my eyes were welling up with tears as I walked along the edges of the site. I barely contained them, and probably would have cried if I had read any of the memorials. It was a pretty long time ago but I still remember that night (in Australia) when it happened, and I was in utter disbelief of what was going on in that emergency news telecast.

After leaving Ground Zero, we headed to City Hall for some views of the Brooklyn Bridge, then headed back uptown to Grand Central Terminal, which was pretty cool, and had a statue of Jay Garrick, the original Flash. Ok, so it wasn't the Flash, it was the Roman God, Mercury... but to be fair, the original Flash's look was based on Mercury. Speaking of comics, we also ventured into Midtown Comics, where I finally found a copy of the black and white edition of Wolverine #32. I had some sushi at Grand Central Terminal before we headed back to the hotel/hostel for a rest break.

When we recommenced our search for the camera, we finally found a shop which let us play around with the camera in question. Unfortunately, the price they were asking for was still quite high, so we moved on. We found a shop that we had missed at Times Square, but that was no better. In fact, it was much worse. The TZ3 retails at around $350... this shop was asking for $500! It was obvious that the shop was there to sucker the tourists into buying gear that was clearly overpriced to the well-educated. Once I said that the price they had the camera at was $150 above retail price, they put it away, probably knowing that they won't be able to trick somebody who knows at least a small bit about cameras.

At this point, we were about to head back to the hostel via subway, but for some reason Liza's metro day pass wasn't scanning properly, and there was no station agent around, so we decided to walk a few blocks, maybe check out another camera store (if we found one) and then catch the closest subway station to that. As luck would have it, there was another store that we had missed (due to construction blocking our view earlier in the day). In fact, it was a store that Liza's mum had recommended. The store was just about to close, but the man in the store told us to come back tomorrow as they were having a sale. Normally I would feel dubious about claims such as that, but the store did have cheap prices in the display window, so I'll give them a chance.

The plan was to head home, eat something, then head back out to watch some baseball at a pub, but Liza's been too mesmerized by her new DS Lite and several games, so it's looking like we'll be staying in for the rest of the night.