… and a street-cart hot dog failed to impress. (
)
Hero Chilean miner Edison Peña has soured on the Big Apple.
The Statue of Liberty wasn’t as magnificent as he had imagined, and the hot dogs just weren’t that tasty, Peña said yesterday, his second day of touring the city ahead of his competition in tomorrow’s ING New York City Marathon.
“It is not white? I thought it was bigger and whiter,” an incredulous Peña said of Lady Liberty while touring Battery Park and posing for photos.
“In the movies, it looks whiter,” said the copper miner, unaware that the statue is made of copper and is green from oxidization.
Then Peña, who ran up to six miles a day in a 1,000-yard tunnel while trapped in the collapsed mine, sampled a New York City classic — a hot dog with ketchup and mustard bought from a downtown cart.
After chomping down, he motioned “so-so” with his hand.
“In Chile, they are better!” said the 12th of the 33 Chilean miners freed from their 69-day imprisonment last month.
The next stop on his tour — organized by marathon officials who had invited him as a guest of honor, never expecting he’d ask to run — was the Empire State Building.
The 1,050-foot elevator ride to the 86th-floor observation deck was nothing compared to the 2,300-foot journey he took inside a tiny capsule to free him from the mine.
“Very pretty,” he said at the top, after taking in a northern view through the deck’s mounted binoculars. “Beautiful.”
There was one iconic city experience that Peña, 34, could not enjoy — the subway.
His minder told The Post that because of his ongoing counseling related to the mine disaster, he shouldn’t be brought underground, and a subway ride was therefore out of the question.
Peña, whose renditions of Elvis songs have endeared him to millions, aims to finish the 26.2-mile marathon tomorrow in six hours.