Buffalo and Niagara Falls

I arrived in Buffalo yesterday morning off the Lakeshore Limited train from Chicago. The train dumps passengers at a station out in the suburbs, so I then had to chill out for an hour waiting for a bus.

Buffalo is a bit of a sad case of a city. The city has been in decline since about 1950, from when it has lost an average 1.1% of its population every year since. More than twice as many people lived in Buffalo in 1950 as live here now. Although still the center of a metropolitain area of some 1.2 million people, the city itself seems to be rotting. There are a lot of very poor people around. And 10,000 abandoned buildings! The roads are crumbling so bad that the bus jiggled with more fervor than a magnitude 9 earthquake, and I thought I was going to get brain damage from all the banging and crashing.

I went out to Niagara Falls late yesterday afternoon. I had a good walk around the American side and then decided to walk across the bridge into Canada. After going through a non-reversable turnstile out of America and on to the pedestrian bridge, I remembered I didn't have my US passport with me! Oops. I had my NZ passport, but it had no visa stamp in it as I had not entered the country on it. So for 20 minutes I wandered around the Canadian side of the falls doing little but fretting about whether I would be able to get back to my hostel. On returning to the American side the customs officer didn't seem very impressed with my story but luckily I had a card with my passport number written down and he let me through anyway.

I'm going to spend the first part of today in Buffalo checking out some of the crumbling old buildings and archetecture, which are actually kind of cool. Then I'm heading back to the falls tonight cause I want to see them after dark - aparently they light up. Also I still have to go on the Maid of the Mist.