"Black Friday," Macy's Windows for Christmas

"Black Friday," as I remember, was the name of a scary B-movie from about 1941 with Bela Lugosi ( you can google this if you want to)--it had famous scene where man hiding in kitchen closet finds he cannot get out because refrigerator has been moved in front of it....and he goes beserk. The movie leaves him there, poor wretch...

Anyway, these days "Black Friday" is simply the day after Thanksgiving when retailers open early, some really early, for what is supposed to be the biggest sale/shopping day of the Christmas season.

Herald Square around Macy's was of course mobbed with bargain hunters....

Macy's has its new Christmas windows ready. I did not find them all that impressive ( the ones they had last year were a lot fancier and more inventive. This year's windows are colorful, though, and attract just as much attention as the windows always do.

I was in Herald Square yesterday too, and 34th Street was just as mobbed as it was today...all tourists, it seemed to me. The Korean tourists were very much in evidence in the neaby Korean Town area, with all their suitcases on wheels and shopping bags and glazed expressions as they drifted through the crowded streets without seeming to know how to navigate their way in a crowd...

I read an article in the New York Times once that a study crew from Columbia University had set up all these hidden cameras and taken pix for hours just to see how people wended their way through places where the sidewalks were always very crowded. Seems like some people, mostly the native New Yorkers, had a distinctive habit of looking at WHERE they were headed at any given moment which gave other people a clue as to how to navigate around THEM...a lot of peripheral vision involved in this, I guess.

Enough really crowded sidewalks for me for a while, though....in the next few days I am going to be looking to walk places that are not so frenetic and where it seems like you are always close to being trampled to death or something.