My New York City impressions
Coming back from vacation is like coming back from another reality. You discover hundreds of unread e-mails waiting for you; first day at work starts right away with the fire drill which lasts till the end of the week; your office is being moved from one building to another; in addition you need to move your own belongings from one apartment to a place you just bought. In one sentence, everything’s back to normal.
My girlfriend and I spent nine days at NYC. After first thirty seconds outside the hotel we immediately realized two things:
- When in Rome, behave like Romans do.
- Adapt, blend in, improvise, and overcome.
Following this piece of enlightenment it became much easier – at the end of the day we were crossing streets like old-timers, looking strangely at people who were studying street maps in the middle of side-walk, and classifying everyone who walked slower than majority of people as tourists ;-)
As nine days is quite a bit of time, we made a decision that we’ll explore the entire Manhattan on foot - no bus, no taxi, and no subway. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? At the end it turned out to be a very good decision. We spent first two days going through all classical tourist attractions: Broadway, Central Park, Empire State Building, Times Square etc. In the beginning of the third day we actually started to relax a little bit which caused another problem - when there are two people with different interests for sightseeing then you eventually end up in the painful negotiation process trying to achieve the win-win situation. We both spend a significant amount of our usual workday finding the middle ground in all kind of different decisions, but at the same time we’re both also used to get what we want. Three-four years ago my negotiation tactics were quite simple: we do everything my way or we won’t do it all ;-) Life makes its corrections, I’ve grown older and for next couple of days we reached a compromise - she took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and tried to educate me on various subjects and I got my desired visit to Brighton Beach (the only time we used subway in NYC). Brighton Beach is probably kind of nostalgic place for everyone who spent part of their childhood in former Soviet Union. To me personally it reminded Estonia in the middle or at the end of eighties ;-)
Though I don’t even pretend that I care or understand anything about art, Metropolitan Museum of Art was impressive, but unfortunately overwhelming. After half a day all I could say was "Yeah, another Monet, whatever, let’s get something to eat." At the same time I wasn’t classified as totally uncivilized human being, because without twisting words in my mouth I was able to admit that "The Phantom of the Opera" we went to see next day on Broadway, was excellent.
Next couple of days we just spent hanging around across Manhattan. There are number of things which I was told before going to vacation: "NYC is dirty", "Manhattan Financial District is extremely crowded", "people in NYC are unfriendly", "NYC is too fast for you" and so on. Fortunately I found none of these predictions to be true (at least based on the short amount of time I spent in the city if it counts for anything). The fact I can confirm is that NYC is expensive ;-) At least compared to the life I’m leaving in Seattle area.
To summarize: as in all good fairytales, we felt at the end of the first day that we love NYC (how cliché is this ;-)) and any chance we get we would like to come back to this place.