December 16th, 2005

shopping, driving and the Chunnel

The most annoying part about driving around New York City is driving around New York City… with the taxis… who use their horns incessantly.

Generally I’m not a horn blower. I don’t like excess noise and I honestly feel that laying on the horn can cause more problems than it can solve.

That being said, I was only in NYC for five hours before I was honking the horn. Not continually, like most of the cabbies, but a fair amount—to show that a) I am here and b) I see you being a jackass and trying to cut me off… back up bitch!

It was slightly exhilarating—in a nail-biting kind of way, lol.

The ticket, however… grrrrrrrr. The $65 ticket for parking somewhere that had no signs. It was a side street and when I asked someone who was going into the building, she told me it was fine. Apparently, someone else in the building called the ticket police and there’s a “complainant’s” name on the ticket. Again, grrrr.

Fortunately, I can oppose the ticket via the Internet—very cool—and I shall prepare a statement to rival all statements. It will be eloquent, it will be precise and it will take off at least $20 from the fee—so help me god.

The coworker and I were less-than-impressed with the ticket, to say the least. Especially after we had spent the better part of the afternoon in back alleys and side streets, going behind fake walls and popping secret trap doors to get to the good fake designer stuff on Canal Street—going “outside of the law” had a certain brass balls effect on both of us. We have Prada, we have Tiffany, we have Yves St. Laurent, we have Chanel and we have Kate Spade—and yes, some of what we bought was presents, so shush it.

Then there was pizza in Little Italy and thai food at Topaz (on 56th, between 6th and 7th), Bloomingdales, FAO Schwartz and Niketown, followed by a three and a half hour drive home…

During which the coworker fell asleep and I, driving in torrential rain, envisioned a road where there was a ceiling and no rain marred my line of sight. My vision fell apart during the whole logic faze, but it did make me wonder about the Chunnel. How did they build the Chunnel? Is it in the water on the sea floor, or under the sea floor? How long did it take to make?

And so, for educational purposes, the answers:

The Chunnel opened in 1994.
Three attempts were made to build the tunnel. The first two failed because of politics and cash.
When the process was finally started, it took seven years to finish.
Construction workers had to move more than 17 million tons of earth to complete the project.
It cost more than $21 billion dollars.
There are three tunnels. Two of the tunnels carry trains and one is used for repair work and emergencies, such as fire. Each tunnel is 32 miles long.
The Chunnel goes from Calais, France to Folkestone, England.
They were built about 45 meters below the seabed under the English Channel.
Many of the tunnel boring machines used on the Chunnel were as long as two football fields and capable of boring 250 feet a day.
When construction began in 1988, British and French tunnel workers raced to reach the middle of the tunnel first. The British won.

Read more…