What can I tell you about New York that you don’t know?
Yes, NYC is enormous…Sydney seems like an ant’s city in comparison. Skyscrapers literally scrape the sky, people walk ultra fast, sirens from emergency services go off every 10 minutes, steam and smoke billow from manholes, frankfurts from street vendors are either kept in lukewarm water or are grilled, Electro Harmonix and Death by Audio guitar pedals are assembled in NYC, Chinatown looks, sounds and smells exactly the same as Sydney’s, there is almost always one weirdo or someone soliciting money on the subway train (perks of a 24/7 subway system…though I intensely enjoyed the a capella barbershop groups that would pass through), nightly experimental music venues are often found in the backrooms of restaurants or ordinary stores, gentrification seems inevitable, the term “hipster” has diluted into “someone that is overtly fashionable.”
New York has given me a chance to kind of kick back and reflect on everything that has happened so far. It has also happened to be the first time I’ve actually gotten a room to myself…no couch or floor in an open space or anything. Actual beds with mattresses and pillows and shit. Also a perfect opportunity to lay down tracks and mix what I’ve already gotten so far.
I’ve come to New York in Spring. The air has been mostly cold, some days there is sun and crisp coldness. It gets so cold that some street vendors claiming to be selling soft pretzels had customers bark at them for selling rock hard pretzels. (or they were super stale) Nothing more insulting or demoralising than biting into something rock hard with the expectation of it being soft. Kind of like when my Dad thought a glass of white vinegar was a glass of water. Schadenfreude though. (yeah I saw Avenue Q live)
I adore the cold. The cold is “thinking” weather for me, ME time. The immediate focus in blistering cold weather is to keep yourself warm, so I seldom found it within my priorities to interact with people. I’d be walking extra fast or doing double-takes of subway stairs to warm my extremities. The cold makes you appreciate shelter and the awesome power of scarves and gloves. The cold lets you blow those steam clouds out of your mouth that look totally badarse. When you’re exploring an unknown city you’ll be walking a buttload, so why rely on cold drinks and shade when you have nature freezing the sweat back into your body?!
The cold also enhances all of New York’s delicacies. How shit would it be to eat a piping hot Artichoke pizza in the stinking heat? Or bumping sweaty elbows in a tiny and crowded Pappaya King and drinking one of their thick high-sugar syruppy beverages that is most likely dehydrating you? Cold wins.
I write this from my second accommodation in Midwood, Brooklyn. The secret bookshelf room in Bushwick, Brooklyn, is where I stayed first for a week. Secret bookshelf room you ask?! I booked this place based on it’s headline on Airbnb…I was mostly sold by the preview images. Friends and family that I told about this room mostly reacted with the same thing: that I would be staying in some sort of dungeon. Well, it was a definitely a dungeon. A dungeon of all the good things!!! Butter the cat was fond of me and I was fond of Butter. Butter would visit me sometimes when I was eating treats in the bookshelf room. Butter even attempted to breach the walls of the bookshelf room, but alas! Butter’s gut couldn’t make the gap to a wealth of treats.
Prior to coming to New York I had read guides on how to blend into the New Yorker crowd. I think this was mostly due to my poor understanding of the crime rate of the general New York City area (thanks Liberty City) and you know, safety precautions of a solo traveller. I tried so desperately to blend in that I constantly feigned confidence and tried to hold back a bewildered face. I walked extra fast with the crowd, often missing my intended location as a result. I tried not crane my neck upwards to ogle at the almost unlimited height of the skyscrapers. I made sure I wore darker attire. I tried to act really annoyed in high-tourist-activity locations like 34th street and Times Square. This was a shitty idea for the first couple of days. Getting lost on your own without asking locals for directions in fear of revealing your noobness was a shitty idea…AT FIRST. Without knowing it I had forced myself to learn stuff – like landmarks, streets, subway lines, where to sniff out 99c cheese pizza. All without listening to a Beastie Boys track.
And here’s is a bit of a cold Manhattan:
As you can probably imagine, a buttload of photos are going to be dropped in the next few parts of USABATTICAL. That is the consequence of having my eyes constantly dilated in my first few days of New York. 2 weeks of New York coming up. It has remained cold and this pleases me.
-Chumpy