Food & Drink – Diplodopest.

New York: Overwhelmingly not Perth

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Wading through bustling crowds in the middle of Manhattan on my second day in New York, I couldn’t help but long for home.

Perhaps it was the 26 hours of flying? It might have been the sheer volume or the attitude of some of people, or even my initial misadventures of the train system (these continue and will probably do so until I come home), but the big city felt like it was going to swallow me whole and feed my remains to the subway rats.*

The first day, having set out to reach Manhattan Island, I inadvertently took a walking tour of the Bronx – lovely in its own right but the opposite direction to where I needed to be. I’ve since repeated this mistake, most recently at 2 in the morning after returning from a trip out of town to view several thousand pumpkins pretty late at night. I’ll elaborate on that experience another time.

Everybody is different, but I’ve found the key to enjoying New York (and I really am – go Cubs!) as a solo traveller to be accepting that you’re not going to fit and watching it all go by.

Below is a list of unexpected observations I’ve made from doing just that. See below.

NY vs brunch:

Honestly from what I’ve heard come out of the mouths of passers-by it feels like brunch is almost as contentious an issue for New Yorkers as the upcoming election. Signs at restaurants and corner stores around the city emphasise its presence and everything I’ve read online suggest it to be one of New York’s greatest assets. However, the word on the street states otherwise. I’ve overheard three conversations about brunch, all of which had negative undertones. One guy walking home from an ice hockey game was frustrated by brunch because it threw out the balance between breakfast and lunch. One young professional on the subway hated brunch food but liked the idea of being able to drink in the day (??).

“Fuck hollandaise,” she proclaimed loudly on the train. Her friends/colleagues/train peers concurred, and a half-baked apology to anyone who didn’t share her views within earshot seemed to fall on deaf, anti-brunch ears.

I’m going to go for brunch on the weekend and explore this phenomenon in more depth. Stay tuned.

Sport sport sport sport:

New Yorkers seem from the outside to have a really insular pride in what their city stands for and what it means to live in New York. Nowhere does this manifest itself more prominently than in the passionate support of sport fans living in the big city. It’s near impossible to board a train without coming across a Yankees hat, a Mets shirt or a Rangers beanie, and while I’m sure there are plenty (probably several million) people living in New York with no interest in sport, these people are understandably harder to spot.

I’m doing a Rangers game tomorrow and a Nets game on election day. Is Linsanity still a thing? Are some sports greater than others? I’ll probably gain some more insight into these pressing matters over the coming days.

Cultural diversity:

Maybe I was ignorant coming in, but from the outside New York comes across far more culturally diverse than I ever expected. Entire neighbourhoods, including the one I’m staying in, are essentially multi-lingual, and significant communities of people from all over the world have built lives for themselves in the Big Apple. It’s really impressive, and unlike anything I’ve really seen in any other major city I’ve visited. I don’t know how a wall would impact that but I can’t imagine it would help.

I’m enjoying New York from the outside, and despite a lack of real conversation I figure that’s where I’d like to stay. There’s so much more to write but this is already at 650+ words, so I’ll save it for the coming week. Thanks for reading.

*Rat City: I was keeping a tally of the amount of rats and squirrels I saw but then I went into the subway at night and couldn’t even count all of the rats. They’re physically huge as well. It’s comforting to know there’s plenty of support around should some adolescent turtles happen to find themselves exposed to chemicals and mutated.

On the other end of the spectrum I’ve seen three squirrels so far. Hoping Central Park will help balance the ledger slightly in the coming days.

Don’t bother

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I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now on the corner Bushwick Avenue and Cornelia Street in Brooklyn feeling as undead as the decorations on every second home in the area.

Jet lag is very real. I’ve not slept properly since 5am Friday morning (Perth time), but that’s a more than fair trade-off all things considered. New York is also very real.

Below are my very tired first impressions of Bushwick:

There are so many dogs around and pumpkins with faces carved in. All of the dogs and pumpkins are of varying size and style. A big dog walked past before. I’d say the pumpkins are 98 per cent seasonal.
I went for a walk down the Brooklyn Broadway thing beneath the J Line of the Subway, and everything here seems as real as it’s portrayed in the media. It’s pretty diverse culturally from what I can tell, which is pretty neat.
I made my first friend while I was eating lunch – his name is Strawberry and he’s a New York Knicks fan. He sang the same three songs when he was in church when he was younger, and proceeded to sing all of these in my general direction. Then he sang that Temptations song My Girl over and over until staff at the restaurant joined in. I wish I’d engaged more conversation and taken a photo of this guy but I was a bit sleepy with it at that point.
The coffee here is cheaper but not quite as good as in Perth, but I’m basing that on two experiences so far. There’s also a wasp in the coffee shop but no one seems too concerned. Maybe it’s the house wasp? Maybe it’s a Halloween decoration?
There’s some great street art happening. I’ll take some pictures to prove it at some point.

That’s probably about as much as I can write right now. I wanted this post to read as incoherent and scattered as my head feels in this moment, so here it at. Will do better in future hopefully thank you for reading anyway.

Roaches and records

roachy-1-diplodopest

Note: A lot of blogs I’ve read open with a cheery welcome post. Through no fault of its own this one doesn’t, but it picks up.

It was an unbearably warm Saturday evening spent alone in a roach infested two-bedroom flat in Perth’s southern suburbs. The apartment – my apartment – had helped me back on my feet, but a lot had changed during my time there and things felt really stale.

The recent changes – a relationship breakdown, a loss of interest in my only hobby and the cancellation of my plans for the evening – added up to feel heavier than the sum of their parts, and as such, things were pretty flat.

I was moving in a few weeks time and most my stuff was packed, but instead of making new plans that evening I sat among the roaches and the boxes and tried to keep the roaches out of the boxes and honestly felt really sorry for myself. It wasn’t a great night.

Pretty much the only thing I hadn’t packed was my record player, and having spontaneously picked up a copy earlier in the day that was when I first listened to Mac DeMarco’s Another One.

I like DeMarco’s work, but I’m no fanatic by any stretch. That said, there was a moment on Another One which particularly stood out. It wasn’t even a song. At the mini-LP’s conclusion the Canadian crooner, now residing in some weird part of New York, blurted out his address and invited the listener around for a cup of coffee.

Normally an invite to anyone who cared wouldn’t elicit a second thought, but in these circumstances it did. I’d never had any motivation to travel to New York before so I slept on the idea, but within a week I’d booked my flights to JFK – initially in September by accident but eventually in October like I’d intended. And so began a plan to travel several thousand miles from the world’s most isolated city to one of its most populous and drink a cup of coffee with a complete stranger.

I’ve read that people have made the trip before, but I’ve not heard of anyone going from Perth to do so. Provided he’s home I guess I’ll know for sure in a few months’ time.