Archive for the 'New York' Category

Fri., Jan. 9, 2009, Flying Somewhere Just South of Greenland

New York looks like it does in the movies, and I know you’ve seen the movies. You’ve probably also been there yourself, so I will not bother describing it.

But a few things were interesting to me:

* It takes damned long to get around. I always pictured New York as this super-dense pile of sky-scrapers with nothing too far apart, like some kind of anti-LA. In fact, even most of Manhattan is still a sprawled out American metropolis and riding the subway for 2 hours to meet a friend is not unheard of.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6241.jpg”,”Subway.”)::

* The subway is old. In China nothing is old unless it’s really old. I spent several happy weeks riding Beijing’s various spotless and modern new subway lines mere weeks after they’d opened. The New York subway, on the other hand, is cramped, creaking, and has almost no escalators. The tracks are usually full of some sort of strange liquid apparently attractive to rats. There are narrow steel support beams everywhere and station names written by hand in little blue on white tiles.

* Time Square was very underwhelming. Just kind of looks like your average major intersection in Seoul, just it’s been in more bad movies.
::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6238.jpg”,”Meh.”)::

* You have to get scanned, x-rayed, and looked at suspiciously to board the Liberty and Ellis Islands Ferry. Clearly, the terrorists have won. There is a very detailed and thoughtful museum at Ellis Island with far less unnecessary patriotic sop than might be expected – though how our past reflects on our current immigration policy is left for the visitor to conclude.

* New Yorkers are very friendly.

* Many Californians seem to find life in New York difficult and unhappy.

* I been a few places, and New York is without a doubt the most diverse place on the globe. Maybe someday I’ll try my hand at being unhappy there for a while, if for nothing else than to try a different ethnicity’s cuisine everyday for a year.

::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/images/IMG_6282.jpg”,”Yay America.”)::

Monday, January 5, 2009, Rolling through the Hudson Valley, New York

Dearest Weblog,

It’s been ever so long since we last corresponded. I’m riding a train in New York now, and rail travel made me think of you. The East Coast sure is a strange place. By now I’ve been to both Europe and Asia more than I’ve been to the East Coast, and last week was my first time ever to New York City – layovers of course excluded.::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6162.jpg”,”Albany Amtrak Station.”)::
Things are similar here to California, more so than, say, Kansas. But something is still just kinda off about this place. People speak about the same as I do and even tell the same jokes, but then they talk about things like turnpikes. (Why “turnpike”? I imagine some sort of spirally roadway with gypsies careening hither and thither.) The architectural ambiance here is old, brick, and less than earthquake-ready. People dress kinda different and care about hockey. Snow is not a fun thing to play on in the mountains, but instead a nuisance on the city streets. There are pizza places on every block and none of them have Parmesan cheese.

::fuzzpic-left(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6132.jpg”,”No! No! Car wash til Brooklyn. Brooklyn!”)::
New York is my first stop on my scenic Eastward journey towards starting a job, I hope, in the Netherlands. I have accepted a formal job offer, but the bureaucracy involved with getting my Dutch work permit is, appropriately, excruciatingly slow. All I can do for the moment is wait, and waiting any longer in Berkeley would be far too stagnant.

::fuzzpic-right(“NewYork/thumbnails/IMG_6161.jpg”,”Gene has his laptop too.”)::
I’ve got my laptop, my snowboard, a few changes of clothes, a ticket via Iceland, and a Eurail pass. Everything else I’ve shipped to the house of my friend’s parents’ friends’ cousin’s son, who (if he really exists) happens to live in the town of Nijmegen, where I will (again, I hope) be working for the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics..

For now, New York is not just on the way, it’s full of old friends. Since I’ve been traipsing about the Far East, a great number of my friends have moved out here in the meantime, and they were all due for a visit. My goal has been primarily to spend time with friends long-missed, and I have not yet done much of touristing value beyond a trip up to Albany, from which I’m now returning. I’m 20 minutes out of Penn Station and I’ve got three more days in NYC. I suppose I’ll try to buy a hot dog on the street and take pictures of the Statue of Liberty of something.