New Year in Time Square

Happy 2008 to you all! Hope you all enjoyed an excellent NYE (partying or just having a quiet one).

I cannot believe it has already been another year... surely, I would have noticed the year going by??? I am also very ashamed of myself because it looked like I only made 2 blog entries for the ENTIRE year... oh well.

I remember last year I went into Manhattan around 5pm on NYE and thought I would take a look at Time Square. The crowd was already way up to 50 something st so I didn't even see Time Square itself. Later, lots of friends from home asked me: "Oh you were in NY? Did you go do the countdown in Time Square? No? WHY NOT???"

And I asked myself the very same question afterwards. I had seen it on TV before and it looked amazing. How many opportunities was I going to get to see this live, in person, in the Big Apple of all places?

So, this year, I did it.

In the beginning, I had thought it would be easy to gather a group to go there with me. Not a chance. My local friends had the following responses (these were pretty much the common 3):
1. Its not worth it - you have to stand for hours and its much better on TV
2. Are you crazy? No way - it is going to be freezing!
3. Nobody does that!!! Only high school kids and tourists do that.

Well hello?? I AM a tourist (and one friend argued that I was not because I had lived in NY for over 12 months).

Finally I talked some sense into one of them, or somehow passed on my craziness to him *phew*

Not wanting a repeat of last year and miss "the party", we arranged to meet up for a late lunch after 1:30pm around Time Square.

So here's how I passed my next 10 hours:

13:30
I thought if I were in an eatery inside Time Square, surely, that meant I was in and all I had to do was hang out there until they kicked us out and then we would go out into the cold and stand around to see the balldrop.

What I didn't realize: I needed to get into "The Pen" in Time Square. The Police actually started putting up barricades around the middle of Time Square and the restaurants were all on the outside of "The Pen".

15:15
When the waitress told us it was going to get real crazy soon and that people were already blocked off in the square, we were like "OH NO!!!" and quickly left the restaurant and hope we could make our way into that pen still.

NOW I understood why there were people sitting on folder chairs on the side of Broadway at around 1:30pm. THAT'S really how early you had to be there to get prime spot inside the pen (unless you KNEW someone who is responsible for crowd control...). My friend said he saw a guy trying to sell "Barricade passes" for 20 bucks and claimed that those would get people through the barricades in or out at will. I wonder if those actually worked...

15:40
My friend and I hoovered around 46th and 7ave just outside of the barricade to the main pen (the block between 42nd and 46th and Broadway and 7ave). We were not even able to get all that close to the barricade themselves. Later I found out that over 1 million people turned out for the balldrop. Let me tell you, it felt like there were MORE people than that.

15:45
So being the obedient people that we were (and that we were not well connected to anyone to get us the VIP treatment), we followed the police's instruction and had to go up a few blocks up to 48th st via 8th ave and "filtered back through down 7th ave". It was also then that I realized we had been standing between 2 pens - Those who were in "The Pen" with prime view; and those who were waiting for the gate to open and merge with Pen 1.

Talking about being there early and then standing in the wrong spot!

16:00
So we ran/jogged/power-walked our way up 8th ave and through 48th st and our immediate reaction was: Oh Nooooooo... We are ruined!!

We couldn't even see where the ball will be dropping from. Luckily, the lady next to me told me that eventually the police would open the barricades between Pen 1 and Pen 2 and we would be moving forward into the square.

16:10
The barricades to Pen1 opened. I almost got crushed as people from the back started pushing forward to rush the gates. It only eased up when the police threatened to throw people who push out of the square.

Once we were in, we were committed. No one was allowed to leave the pen and re-enter. If you had chosen to leave, you would have been watching the whole thing on a TV somewhere else. Just to make things interesting - there were no such thing as porta-loos either. That's right. 9 hours with no toilet break.

Temperature was 35F (1C). Crowd was restless. Let the fun begin.

16:15
We just realized we still had almost 8 hours of standing to go. Oh boy. Curiously it wasn't cold. Then again, we had 1 million bodies out there generating heat. Go figure.

16:30
My other local friends were right. The square were full of tourists. I had people from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK and Brazil immediately around me. Even when they were from the US, they were from places like the west coast or Iowa. Out of the 20-30 people that were around me, only my friend and another guy were from New York (and well they were only there because other "tourists" dragged them along!)

We chatted and made new friends with people arounds us, finding out where they came from, how long they were in New York for, what they did, who they came with and agreed this was totally insane to be standing around for hours but how exciting it was as well.

There was a group of German guys around us who were getting boisterious after drinking their "special" Pepsi. They sang, they danced and they did a bit of stand-up comedy. That was actually quite entertaining. Not to mention they were in identical "New Year countdown" uniform.

17:00
Sky was getting dark. The organizers started doing some performance rehearsals for the NYE show later on in the evening.


18:00
Everyone did a warm up "count down to new year" for South Africa. The ball also began making its way to the top of the pole where it would eventually drop down from in 6 hours time. The crowd was very enthusiastic and there was even a little bit of firework happening.

Right around that time, the German guys had finished their drink and inevitably this would lead to their failure on their mission to watch the balldrop.

18:10
2 of the German guys had to leave because they "could not hold it in any longer". The other 2 were showing some signs of distress but were still willing themselves to stay.

18:25
Oh well, the remaining 2 German guys couldn't hold it any longer. So they "recycled" their Pepsi bottle. We (the rest of the people around them) all took pity on them and since they had been so entertaining to us, we helped them out by being the "walls" while they took care of business. Needless to say, there were a lot people offering tissues, hand sanitizers afterwards...

18:40
There were no more bottles left to "re-cycle" - the German guys had to bid us farewell and happy new year and headed out of the pen. That actually was quite a sad moment for all of us. We almost felt like a tribe losing someone someone at Tribal council on Survivor.

19:00
Kid Rock was rehearsing for his performance and that was on the Pontiac Stage. The stage was almost right above us, but we were behind it so we couldn't see anything happening but we heard him and saw the pyrotechnics happening. I took out my Sudoku book and began doing them with my friend.

19:30
There were quite a lot of people leaving now - probably people who couldn't stand any longer, kids who got tired and cranky so the family had to leave, more people who needed comfort breaks. The rest of us soldier on.

We did a few more count-downs for places around the world.

20:00
We got restless and some of us decided if we were to do something in a group, maybe we will get on TV. So when the next song came on, we did the wave, we did the jumpin'-jumpin' move, we danced and we even did the cellphone wave. Didn't think anyone noticed us. Damn.

21:00
Pontiac staffers decided to cause trouble by throwing red hats into the crowd - there were thousands and thousands of people, they were only throwing out what, 100 hats or so in that section?? Needless to say, people near the side of the barricade got them; those of us in the middle could only reach our hands up in the air like starving children and curse the staffer for their inability to thrown anything further than immediately in front of them.

22:00
More goodies being passed out - big orange hotdog-like balloons with gold foil streamers at the top were being distributed out by someone on the side of the barricades. Again, those people who already got the red hat also got the balloons. It's only a balloon. Who cares (alright, its like sour grapes, whatever).

With under 2 hours to go, the crowd woke up and became more energetic again.


23:00
The entertainment for the night officially began. Since we had been there all day/night, we have actually heard everything once already. Sometimes we didn't even know who they had on stage, but due to the excitement and anticipation of what's coming in an hours time, I think the crowd was just cheering to whatever the MC was saying. Anderson Cooper came on stage to read some wishes entered by tourists at the Visitor Center; Jordon Spark from the latest installment of American Idol sang; Kid Rock did his thing; then even "Hanna Montana" turned up. Carrie Underwood sang as the closing act I believe.

23:58
John Lennon's "Imagine" was playing and unbelievably, everyone began to put their hand up in the air and swayed side to side to the beat of the music. Its hard to explain but the atmosphere was incredible.

23:59
The ball finally began its descent. On the big screen down at 42nd Street, the countdown clock started. The chanting of the count grew louder and louder in the crowd, until everyone was shouting at the top of their lungs...

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...

Right on cue, the fog horns sounded, everyone blew their whistles and a million people yelled out "Happy New Year!" A shower of confetti slowly rained down onto us, floating, twisting, gliding down and lifting up again in the cool drifts of the night.

00:00
I remember staring up into the sky at the colour rain and city lights for what seemed like an eternity (and it was probably more like a minute or 2 in reality) and when "New York New York" came on in the midst of all this I thought to myself:
This WAS definitely worth the wait.