Snow Cones on Coney Island

It is the fourth of July and all America is abuzz, electrified with an energy that may have come from the sun. Oh the sun, finally showing its beautiful rays after a week of hiding!

If you, like me, are heading to Coney Island on this beautiful day, on the fourth of July, there must be one thing on your mind, apart from the beach: Nathan's Famous International Hotdog Eating Competition. This bizarre competition, in which people from all over the world travel to this mini peninsular/island to chow down a table full of hotdogs in ten minutes. Some of us want to see the longest standing Champion from Japan upstage the newcoming American who has taken his spot for the past two year, but most people, like me just want to see manic consumption, be amused, disgusted, shocked and amazed.

The place reached fever pitch half an hour before its ten minute run, and the frenzy of the immense crowd was such a wonderful thing to feel. Joey Chestnut won again. And so did Nathan's Famous the hotdog shop, who had a more than a snaking queue at every cashier point that day.



Moving on to the boardwalk and the beach, I pass the famous cyclone and colourful ferris wheel of the Coney Island amusement park, which was threatened with closure a few months ago. This place, Surf Ave and the boardwalk are the perfect images of American FUN in the early 1900s, especially on a day like this. Men are running around half-naked, some with big boomboxes on their shoulders. Ladies have their shades, sometimes a tasteful swimsuit, and I think I've stepped into a different century.

On the beach people are splayed like beached walruses. But they're having fun so they don't care. Many read. Some sleep. Some get buried in the sand by their naughty children. On the pier others fish for crabs with bits of chicken, sometimes unrecognisable meats. (If you fish for fish and whale for whales, do you crab for crabs?) There is scarcely any room on the pier for rodless and lineless voyeurs like me, who just wants to catch everything with my camera.