Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Greetings From The Big Apple!

Well, I'm just back from New York City! And what a cool city it is! Easy to get around (you don't need a car) easy to have a good time in, easy to find fun stuff to do. And it's HUGE! I spent 5 days just in Manhattan and didn't scratch the surface!
EMS must be miserable, all those high-rise buildings with no elevators. And the hospitals I saw have no ramps; the ambulances just park on the street and off-load in the middle of traffic! Still, statistics say that NOHD, per ambulance, is twice as busy as NYC. They run 12 calls in 24 hours. HAH! That's a slow 12-hour shift for us!
I happened to find myself on 5th avenue and saw everyone lining up behind barricades on Sunday. Curious, I asked and found out it was the start of the gay pride parade. I hung around to see how NYC handled parades. The start of the parade was dominated by New York's contingent of gay police, fire and EMS workers. While the Police and Fire departments made a decent enough showing, New York's EMS gay contingent was woefully lacking! Maybe 6 or 8 EMT's were in the parade along with a rainbow-draped unit. Big woop. NOHD could beat that with A and B watch tied behind its back!
If you ever want to practice your foreign language skills, try a stint in New York! I must have heard at least 20 different languages on the streets. I caught myself a couple of times speaking Spanish to people who spoke no Spanish at all, just because it was so common there! And if you want, you can easily practice your French, Italian, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Polish and Japanse without even trying!
Well, missed y'all on this trip! Lemme know if any of you go to NYC anytime soon and maybe I'll join you!
Adios!
-Fitz-

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey fitz... hope you took lots of pics while you were there!! I would love to see the Big Apple, but it won't happen anytime soon, so pics will have to do for now. Glad you had a good time!

Anonymous said...

I'm jealous! Anytime after Christmas, though, I'm ready for a trip; a group trip would be cool, too. I'm glad you had such a wonderful time. Daaamn, could you imagine NOHD (NOHD is still our name isn't it?) loose in NYC!

i'msofain said...

I imagine some definite havoc could be wreaked by a bunch of NOHD (for now)'ers in NYC. The only obstacle would be the fokking expensive drink prices!! It taint fo' the faint of wallet.

One of these days before I die I will live there (and San Francisco, London, etc etc etc). hahaha

i'msofain said...

yes that's true, FDNY does more calls a day than any other service in the country, but I read somewhere on this here internet thing that NOHD runs more calls per unit than any other service in the country. think that's true?

Anonymous said...

I don't know about that, but I think we handle the most seizure calls on the face of this earth! It seems like one out of every 3 people have seizures around this place!