Day Twenty Three – Falling Glass

June 26th; Today is a small day, really. We are going to a glass museum, and then to Niagara falls.

We got up early, fell asleep on the bus, got woken up for breakfast, fell sleep, ended up in a place called Corning. I don’t where that is. There is a glass museum though. It sounds lame, but it’s cool when you go inside. It’s kind of like a more specific version of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It’s specific about glass. It has plenty of modern glass work, which is undoubtedly cool but a little sad when you read the plaque stating it was a life work. Glass knives, glass cubes, glass towers, all sorts of crazy things. We had to kind of speed through the history section, since Pum saw us and yelled us through to the glass making demonstration. An older fellow narrated and occasionally stepped in whilst the younger guy did most of the work. It was cool, they showed the blowing and the reheating and the shaping and molding. Not bad at all. Glass can be fun.

That finished and we rushed through. Kate and I found the trippy glass innovations section. The whisper tube was cool. You stand at opposite ends of this big pickle shaped room, face opposite directions and whisper really quietly into the wall. The person on the opposite side can hear you really clearly. It was awesome. I want a pickle tube house. Also cool where the big glass bowl kind of things, which resulted in tons of hilarious photos. My favourite was the inside curved mirror. You walk across this line and an upside down version of you is projected in front of your vision and you think it’s right in front of you and then there’s another and another and then you run into the wall. It was weird but cool.

We had lunch, it was terrible. Don’t eat at the Corning Glass Museum if you can help it. Niagara was next, after a huge bus trip. It’s a pretty impressive place. We took the Maid of the Mist boat. You go down this big elevator to get to the river level, grab a poncho and jump on the boat. The first waterfall is lame and unimpressive. I mean, it’s good, but it’s not what you’d expect Niagara to be. You get a bit wet, you take a few photos before your camera gets flooded out, and you let off a sigh. Then the boat speeds up again, and you see the first few metres of a wall of water and then nothing but white.

It really is huge. You struggle to keep your eyes open in the mist. It’s just water battering you like the cannons of a thousand tiny men against Gulliver on his travels. You can’t see and you don’t wanna risk your camera to take a photo. Anything not under the poncho is drenched, anything under the poncho is at least damp. The water gets rough. It’s loud. For a while you are completely engulfed in a world of off senses. Your hearing is gone, your feeling is strong, your sight is overwhelmed.

Then you come out, and you are wet. The world calms down, returns to normal. Occasionally you get a spray blown on the wind, reminding you of the calamity you just came from. You make a calm return to land. We didn’t throw out our ponchos though. We climbed stairs up into one side of the waterfall. Everything is constantly flooded and flooding. When you get to the top you can walk pretty much into the offshoot of the thing. I stood there for a while. One gust of wind and I was soaked, the poncho essentially shot to pieces and blown off. Good thing I waterproofed my shoes, no?

There’s nothing much to talk about from there. We headed back into a town called Buffalo to stay for the night. Buffalo is a bit of a hole. I thought I’d touch on something quite small but in it’s own way significant. Once you’ve been to America, everything becomes more relevant. Movies, music, images, books. After I’d been in New York for a while and went to see Sex and the City (Sarah and Mel, you’d be proud), it was much cooler. There was Central Park, there was the library we were in the day before, there’s this part of town, that part of town. After seeing the Whitehouse, movies like Independence Day and Die Hard 4 make more sense. You can see the impact that those things would have on an American. After being to DC, you can see the origins of the intense love of liberty that many Americans hold. Maybe it’s all propaganda, but it doesn’t matter – it makes more sense now than it did before I left.