The City (New York, USA)

 

As the bus drove across New Jersey we could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan on the horizon. The bus dumped me right in the middle of the city and I made my way via the subway across to Brooklyn where I found the apartment I was renting in a slightly dodgy neighbourhood. It wasn’t as bad as the one in Philly, but I expected to be mugged at least once in my two weeks here. I rented it off a black musician named Shel, who used to be Princes keyboardist.

New York has five ‘boroughs.’ These are Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. During my time I would explore all of the boroughs. I stayed in Brooklyn because that’s where the cheapest accommodation I could find was and it had good subway connection to the rest of the city, especially Manhattan.

 

From the time I decided to put NYC on my itinerary I knew it was going to be one of the highlights of the trip. I had great expectations for this city and it exceeded every one of them, making it one of the best places I’ve ever been.

It seems everywhere you look in this city there is something recognisable from TV or movies. Street names, neighbourhoods, buildings – I feel like I was finally in the world that I had been looking into from the outside all these years. So many TV and books and movies are set here that even the most commonplace sights or landmarks have been romanticised and glorified. And then there is the important sights, like the Statue of Liberty which I visited in my first couple of days, taking a boat out on the harbour for a view of the statue and the endless skyline in the background, which are every bit as glorious as they have been made out to be.

On top of that is the fact that New York is pretty much the capital of the world. New York leads the world in finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education and entertainment. It is the beating heart of the modern world.

Manhattan alone has so many neighbourhoods, each one with its own distinct characteristics, not to mention all the neighbourhoods across all five boroughs. This is a big and complicated city, so I had to be strategic about which parts I saw. I did a lot of walking here, getting to know different parts of the city on the street level, and I calculated doing 15kms on an average day. My shoes couldn’t handle it, the rubber sole getting thinner and thinner by the day.

One of the first things I did was cross the Brooklyn Bridge from downtown Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, also known as the Financial District.  It took about 20 mins to walk from one side to the other, views all the way up Manhattan, with its endless supply of high rises forming a greyish skyline to the horizon. I would cross this bridge ten times during my time in New York, sometimes in the misty rain when cloud covered the tops of the skyscrapers, sometimes in clear weather so you could see all the way out to the Statue of Liberty and the New Jersey shipping Industry in the distance behind her, and sometimes during the evening when I could look up towards midtown and see the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, two of the most identifiable buildings here, lit up against a dark sky.

I went to the top of the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Building, both having great views over the city.

 

In Lower Manhattan I wandered down Wall Street and past the American Stock Exchange, saw the famous ‘raging bull’ statue, and the site where the World Trade Centre towers stood. This area had been transformed into the 9/11 Memorial Park, the footprint of those old buildings forming the outline for two big waterfall pools. It was pretty crazy to think that I was standing on the site where those towers collapsed 13 years ago. One of the newest buildings down this end of town is the One World Trade Centre, which really stands out.

 

In Midtown I sat in Union Square to watch the punks and suits share a bit of park space, and wandered up past the Flat Iron Building, the sharp cornered building that used to be the world tallest. I visited the New York library and Grand Central Station, both impressive buildings.

 

Times Square is a highlight, filled with thousands of people, enormous billboards and screens, bright lights no matter the time of day, yellow taxis zooming around, and people in super hero costumes. An exciting place, for sure, reminded me of Hong Kong and Tokyo, the amount of neon being used.

Times Square is most famous for its Broadway scene. I went to see a play called ‘The Cripple of Innishman,’ at the Cort Theatre, and it was one of the best things I did in New York, not just because I had great seats right near the front (that I got for 50% off – but still pricey), but also because it starred Daniel Radcliffe, the guy I have been watching play Harry Potter in that movie series that started when I was eleven. It was great to see him up there doing his thing, and it made me realise that to be up there onstage, in this city especially, you need to be really good.

 

And then there is Central Park. Jesus Christ, I have never seen anything like this. A whole section of the island, a big rectangle, has been left as park land, filled with lakes, a big dam, patches of woods, bridges over creeks, meadows, big rock outcrops, playgrounds, a zoo, baseball fields, and just a lot of open space. It’s an enormous area, and it took me chunks of several days to cover it all.

 

Other parks I spent time in include Bryant Park, a midtown lawn surrounded by office buildings and their high walls of glass, where I would often have lunch and a snooze on the grass, and the High Line, an old above the road railway track converted into a really cool garden path that weaves through the buildings of the city.

I walked along Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue – all these famous avenues with the most expensive real estate in the world, expensive high rise apartment buildings and street front stores such as the famous Tiffanies & Co.

New York would be a great city to have a lot of money to spend. The consumerism, the entertainment options, the restaurants and bars, and with enough money New York is said to be the only place in the world where you can make a phone call and get anything you want delivered to your door, anytime of day.

This is also a city that would be best shared with someone else, and I felt a little guilty that it’s a place Rin so desperately wanted to come and see and yet here I was doing all by myself.

 

I explored the trendy neighbourhoods of Greenwich Village (where Bob Dylan started out), West Village, the Meat Packing District and East Village. If I was going to move to New York this is where I’d go.

I went up to Harlem, a strong hold for black culture which was far nicer than I expected, but still with a few housing developments and city basketball courts for character.

Brooklyn in itself is a whole world. I could have spent my whole time exploring just this one borough. It taught me how many minorities live in this city, and make certain parts their own. (Over 800 languages spoken in New York!) The neighbourhood I was in, called Bedford-Stuyvesant (known as ‘Bed – Stuy, Do or Die), is the second largest African American conglomeration in the country (after Detroit). I walked up through a Jewish area, where it was mostly Hebrew as opposed to English on business signs and school buses. Down in the south of Brooklyn I walked along the big boardwalk from Cony Island, where I had a chilli dog overlooking the beach, to Brighten Beach, which hoists the biggest community of Russians outside the former USSR.  Wandering around, looking at people, hearing them talk, this was pretty apparent. It really surprised me how these people just stick to the few blocks that are ‘theirs.’

Other areas I explored in Brooklyn were Williamsburg, the hippest new college-area-without-a-college, filled with trendy bars and quirky café’s, and an army of hipsters. I did a big loop around some of the white and Italian areas, and through an industrial area which had a little river running through it that is supposedly 2/3rds full of guns tossed into it.

 

So what did I eat in NYC? Within 24 hours of being in New York I had eaten the key American city foods; hot dogs, street pizza, fried chicken, and burgers and fries.

 I hunted down the restaurant used in Seinfeld as Monks, and had a sandwich. Sounds pretty pathetic, but these New Yorkers are serious about their sandwiches, and they serve them packed with layers and layers of meat, dump a whole heap of fries on the plate and a big pickle. I also got addicted to what they call a Hero (a meat roll, usually pastrami or corned beef) at all the Deli/Grocer corner stores in my neighbourhood, and I started most days with a cream cheese bagel.

Also, there is actually street food in New York, and not just hot dogs and pretzels. These vendors set up outside office buildings and seel all sorts of great Mexican, Asian and Arabic food for cheap prices. I also found a ‘White Castle,’ – a fast food burger joint that’s sells bit sized burgers (I got 6) made famous by the ‘Harold and Kumar’ movies.

In Chinatown I had some great noodle soups and Singapore noodles – the latter, I had learned a few years ago in Singapore, being invented in America. Next to Chinatown is Little Italy, filled with expensive Italian restaurants, which I wandered but wandered back out of to go get a big, greasy slice of pizza served on a paper plate for $1 a pop.

In my explorations outside Manhattan I found what people were calling the ‘real’ Little Italy and Chinatown.

 I headed up into The Bronx borough and walked through a section of it, starting off in a pretty sketchy area with housing developments, ‘street crazies’, and a big, rusted out railway above the street, and working my up to the busy downtown area, low rise buildings and a rush of people and traffic, which reminded me of parts of Brooklyn. Between the two I passed along Arthur Street, known for its Italian community and their restaurant, bakery and grocery establishments. I popped in to one place and ordered a pasta off a guy who would have fit in in a Godfather movie.

When in the Flushing district of Queens, a place so dominated by asians that the streets are crowded with Chinese, Vietnamese and Taiwanese restaurants, grocers, barbers, etc, where even the McDonalds billboard looming above the street is in big Chinese writing with small English caption below, I had a great meal that I couldn’t even finish at prices I would have paid in China.

While in Queens I also checked out Flushing Park, which hosts the world’s biggest globe, created for the 1914 world fair. Here I wandered through a bit of suburbia and saw families out for the kids soccer matches. Queens has traditionally been middle class suburban sprawl from Manhattan and Brooklyn, but is now becoming a haven for ethnic communities, such as those from Asia, as mentioned above in Flushing, and from Central American and Arab countries.

What took me out to Queen was the baseball. I sat high in the stands and watched four hours of baseball – The New York Mets versus (fittingly) the Philadelphia Phillies. The Mets are kinda like the working man’s team, the eternal underdogs, whereas the Yankee’s are the best of the best, a holy entity for the majority of New Yorkers. The Citi Field ballpark was spectacular in itself and once the game got going it was pretty captivating.

I also went to Madison Square Garden to watch a game of basketball. It was a womens basketball match because the men were in the play offs and I don’t like basketball enough to pay for those tickets (in fact I don’t like basketball enough to pay for any tickets – Erin sent them through as a surprise one morning.) I watched the New York Liberty get crushed by Connecticut Sun, and the most interesting thing about the game was the quarter time singing and dancing, the national anthem, kiss cam, the T-shirt gun totting mascots, and bizzarely, fans chosen to play musical chairs in the middle of the court during time out breaks. Only in America would continuous entertainment be so well perfected. The arena itself was cool to see, lots of memorabilia from big events around the venue.

 

I journeyed to Staten Island one misty day to see what was going on down there. As it turned out, there wasn’t much going on down there at all. Taking the free ferry from Lower Manhatten and passing Brooklyn on one side, the Statue of Liberty and the industry of New Jersey on the other side, I arrived to discovered that Staten Island is not much more than a suburban stronghold where people can live quietly with convenient access to transport into the big city where they can work amongst all the noise and chaos. So close to Manhatten but Staten Island has a townish feel to it.

I did museums. The Natural History Museum, where I saw some pretty important fossils that I had been learning about for years at high school and uni (‘missing link’ species that confirmed Darwinism, ‘Lucy’ skeleton one of earliest humanoids, transect of a 1,300 year old tree, enormous meteorites, etc.)  It was unbelievable that so many of these extremely important scientific finds where right here, all of them original, and on public display. Standing there looking at  two sets of footprints on prehistoric mud that had dried to rock, from two of our earliest ancestors walking side by side, the furthest dated marker for how early humanoids starting walking upright, it was kinda like a religious experience.

 

I also went to the Museum of Modern Art, which at times blew me away and other times made me realise how fine the line is between what is acclaimed art and what is ridiculous. Here I saw the original ‘Starry Night’, which I’ve had in my room for a few years. I had less patience despite there being more to see in the Metropolitan Museum of Art which had art and artefacts from all over the world.

Of course I did all these special things and saw the famous places, but I also appreciated the streetscapes that weren’t especially extraordinary, and hadn’t been referenced on a show with a multi-million viewership.

I liked that the city had glamour and grit. Not as much grit as back in the 90’s I’m told, but grit enough to keep me intrigued. I especially liked the aesthetic of the bricked apartment blocks with the outside fire escape, and on the nicer side of the coin, the tree lined streets of Brownstown town houses with the walk ups.

After two weeks, I had done what I could. I was exhausted. New York is the quint essential city, and an exciting one to be in. I had leathertramped it good, explored parts of the city that felt like they could have been on the opposite sides of the planet, and seen places and sights I’d only ever before seen on a TV screen. Of course by this stage the rubber had melted off my shoes to the extent that, and I shit you not, my socks had been worn through on the pavement and I was pressing skin to concrete.

There was still so much I wanted to see and do here, to be amongst it all – the feel of the city, and to get to know it better, but my time was up. I resolved that I would be back before too long, and next time I wouldn’t be alone.

On my last night as I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge, the final time after so many crossings, I looked up as I passed under the big archways on the Brooklyn end and told myself that next time I crossed I would be holdings Rins hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Streets of Philly (Philadelphia, U.S.A.)

Arriving in Chicago airport for a layover felt like a homecoming of sorts. I was back in a rich, first world, English speaking country where I could put toilet paper into the toilet and drink tap water. For the first time ever that all appealed to me.

Unfortunately my flight was delayed 5 hours, so I didn’t get into Philly under after dark. I’m a bit over getting into strange new cities at night, trying to use public transport to find my accommodation, and I had heard that the Philly subway was a bit dodgy (especially with me having all my gear). Six months ago I would have taken my chances, instead I opted to get a taxi to the apartment I was staying. I would have enjoyed the luxury of such an extravagance if I wasn’t so obsessed with how much it was costing me.

The next morning I woke up and looked out the window of the room I was renting in the apartment of a work-from-home architect and saw a squirrel running around the branches of leafless tree.

I caught the subway into the city centre – a subway that was above ground and ran on top of the main road. It felt pretty sketchy at first, and I was a bit spooked that I was the only white person in sight. But after a few days I decided I fit in well enough  – my latest pair of shoes are coming apart again, my jumper is hand stitched at the wrists to keep it together, my hair is longer and hasn’t been washed this year, my watch is being held together by a piece of wire and a rubber band, and I couldn’t remember the last time my increasingly scrappy clothes had been washed.  

I walked around Philadelphia downtown and soaked it all in. I explored the red brick historical quarters, parks with squirrels running around everywhere, the nice neighbourhoods ( I forgot people could live in such nice conditions), the trendy, punky neighbourhoods, baseball fields, churches and cemeteries, the business district with its high rises, the impressive town hall in the very centre of town. I walked along Benjamin Franklin Drive and up steps that lead to a view back over downtown that Rocky made famous in the first movie, saw the statue of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky next to those famed stairs, ate in the Reading Terminal Food Market, saw the Italian Market – the biggest open air market in the US, the Delaware river, Chinatown, and the other ordinary streets which excited me all the same.

 

Walking those streets felt like seeing a celebrity in real life. All the little details – the squirrel, the above ground subway, the big American cars, the city scape, the houses, the flags outside the doors, the apartment blocks with fire escape stairs, the names of streets and buildings – it all made me feel like I was in a movie. Having consumed so much American pop culture my whole life I felt like I was attuned to the cultural nuances that would otherwise be invisible or meaningless to me in more foreign places. Even seeing a big yellow school bus for the first time made me reach for my camera.

Philly is a historical town. Who knew that it was the first American capital for ten years before it was moved to Washington DC? Not me, that’s for sure. I did a free walking tour which focused on the historical aspects of the city. We saw ‘Independence Hall’, photo above, which is especially important because it was the place the early colony leaders made an agreement to claim independence from England, and also where the US constitution was read aloud to the public for the first time.

We also heard a lot about George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, seeing Washington’s house and Franklins grave. Our somewhat cynical guide (maybe he was pissed only 2 people showed up), pointed out that despite the reputation these two men have in America, the house we saw had slave quarters that indicate Washington found a loophole in the laws at the time for keeping slaves, and Franklin was romantically buried next to his wife, despite it being well known that he was blatantly unfaithful to her throughout their whole marriage.

I always thought US history was a bit boring but doing that tour made me think otherwise. There’s just so many dam stories in the world, how can anyone get to them all?  

In Philly I ate cream cheese bagels and cheesesteaks. A cheesesteak is a roll containing shaved steak covered in dripping, hot cheese. Philly is famous for it, and obsessed with it. There are two key ‘institutions’ for this food; Geno’s and Pats. These two big stores face off against each other, having done for a long time now, and both claim to be the best cheesesteak in town. I decided to go for Pats, and it was the best cheesesteak I had in Philly. After I had finished I got talking to a local guy with an Italian American gangster accent and a gold chain, and he told me that Pats had been doing the same thing in the same spot since he was a little boy, and even since his father was a little boy. Pats was the very first one to do the cheesesteak, back in the thirties. This fella told me he worked at Pats for 10 years, then Geno’s for 6.  These places have been part of the Philly identity ever since, and everyone in Philly seems to have an opinion on where and who does the best cheesesteak.

The most important part of Philadelphia for me was my immediate neighbourhood. I was staying in an apartment townhouse, the type of architecture I’ve only ever seen in movies, and when I went out one afternoon to explore the area I wasn’t game to take my camera out of my pocket. It was hardcore.  I always thought first world countries to be a little boring due to lack of adventure, but the streets of Philly, always considered a roughish town and historically with big Mafia problems, made me think different. This was a very poor area, mostly black people, and the few white people seemed perfect for the Jerry Springer show. The streets, the people, the copious use of the words ‘motherfucker’ and ‘nigger’, the heavily modified shitbox cars pumping out hip hop, the questionable parenting, the street wise kids, the beggars, the rows of apartments - it was gritty, real life lower class suburban USA. Abandoned factories punctuated the endless rows of two story apartment blocks. In some of these poor streets you could look down between the blocks and see the shiny skyscrapers of the city centre in the distance. There were dodgy people around, and some streets that I avoided going down altogether. It was eye opening. Only in a few places around the world have my dusk strolls been so much of an adrenaline rush.

Philly was a great American city to see, but it was just the opening act. The main event, New York City, loomed large and grand in the far distance as the bus out of Philly crossed New Jersey... 

 

Food and Fighting (Mexico, Part 2)

 

The second leg of the Taco Tour began with me waking up on a bus. I had hardly slept but now the sun was up so I could open the curtain and watch the scenery pass. What I saw was unlike any landscape I have ever seen; hundreds of thousands of tall and straight cactus, pointing up to the sky, sometimes just one big, spiky green trunk, others with several big, spiky green braches growing out from the original. The landscape was mountainous and there were several species of other succulents and non-succulents, but those cacti totally dominated, sometimes for as far as the eye could see. Sadly, this is the best photo I could get.

 

Seeing as we were only travelling up to Mexico City, for the safety reasons previously mentioned, we weren’t going to be able to see much of the desert landscapes of Mexico. Just a few days ago we had been in a tropical environment, so I was quite surprised to see the cactus this far down. In this area we also passed many Mezcal distilleries and their plantations of a species of cactus they use to ferment into a spirit.

My eyes were glued to the bus windows watching all this, except when I was interrupted by the Mexican man sitting next to me who offered some marshmallows for breakfast, and the military check point where we all got out for the bus to be searched.

We reached the town of Oaxaca (pronounced Wahaca), and even though the landscape had changed, the street food culture sure hadn’t. Here they sold all sorts of great Mexican food out on the street or inside the big food market, which is where I had all my meals. The town has a few favourites, such as fried and spiced grasshoppers, which I haven’t seen or had since Thailand. I ate a couple and they were overwhelmingly bitter and a bit too soft, nowhere near as good as the crunchy, salty ones you get on the streets of Thailand.

 

Apart from trying a bunch of local dishes, we visited some of the most euorpean-esque churches we’d seen throughout all of Central America, and wandered and rode bikes through the gridded streets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was all going of smoothly until three weeks of hard-core street food caught up with me. I’m surprised it took that long, to be honest with you. Having several rounds of antibiotics on the ready, I was eating whatever the hell I felt like, regardless of what the hygiene of some of these vendors seemed to be. It didn’t bother me that Mexico has the highest rate of death by food related illness in the world. But when it hit, it wasn’t pleasant. Especially sharing a room with someone else. I gave it a few days to sort itself out and then when it didn’t I got back on the antibiotics again, leaving myself just enough for one more round of food poisoning before the safety of Australian food.

 A descent bout of food poisoning like that will make you feel wilted, homesick and unenthused about being alive, but it’s totally worth it. Eating on the streets is as real as it gets.

The next day I sat through the six hour bus ride to Mexico City watching more of the cactus landscapes roll past and hoping I wouldn’t suddenly explode.

Mexico City is one of the biggest cities on earth with the third highest GDP behind Chicago and NYC. It’s the reason why Mexico is moving so quickly into the ‘developed countries’ category.

 

First night in the city and we went to see the Lucha Libre – the Mexican wrestling. The stats show that Mexico is a country that has a certain knack for violence, especial drug cartel related. People are getting knocked off left, right and centre here, but mostly up north. We decided the only violence we wanted to be exposed to would be that of big guys in tights and masked on the inside of a ring, in a big stadium filled with cheering fans.  Me and Fok bought wrestling masks for the occasion, and it was a good spectacle. I’ve seen the Americans wrestle in Australia, the Japanese wrestle in Kyoto, so I was interested to see how the Mexicans dance. The wrestling was pretty bad at times - to the point of being embarrassing, and I didn’t quite understand the rules, but the characters were funny and they had some moves I’ve never seen before, the atmosphere was great – electrifying, as the Rock would say, and the whole thing was like a big shot of nostalgia back to when me and the boys lived and breathed it.

Only a couple of days later me and Fok would be wandering around some of the more dodgy looking streets in Mexico City when we would come across a tattered and littered street filled by a crowd surrounding a homemade wrestling ring in the middle of the road (think hose for ropes). We watched four overweight, underskilled, masked guys beat the shit out of each other right there in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street, in the middle of a Mexico City suburb. A highlight of Mexico.

Apart from the wrestling, we saw some impressive Aztec ruins on the edge of Mexico City, the best I’ve seen in this part of the world, and saw some ruins in the city centre, which had been partially destroyed by the Spanish for material to build the big cathedral that now overlooked the site.

 

We also saw some native dancing right in front of the cathedral, which I though was a nice contrast (I especially liked the guy dressed up as death), explored the glossy business district of town and then the more gritty other side of town, two suburbs that could have been on the opposite sides of the world, wandered down busy pedestrian streets and through parks, and ate at street stalls, and at tin y restaurants with vendors pumping out the one dish.

 

The second of five nights in Mexico City I reached 100 tacos on the Taco Tally. The picture of me is about to eat number 101. I was seriously over tortillas by then, and craving bread, but we ate at where Anthony Bourdain said the best taco is Mexico City could be found, and it was good enough to re-inspire me to eat more tacos over the following days and take my final tally to 113.

The Taco tour was over.

And so was my time with Fok. For 2 months and 20 days we had shared rooms, experiences, and the ups and downs of travel. From Cuba we travelled as friends and stayed that way right up through Central America and to Mexico. At times it was challenging but it was much more rewarding than I could have hoped, so I’m proud of the both of us for how well we managed to keep it real and how great of a time we had. Thanks buddy.