New York!!!

October 29, 2023

New York!!!

I love New York!!! I didn’t know how I’d feel about it being an introvert who tends to feel overstimulated quite easily. But I truly loved it. For one thing, it’s physically so impressive - streets and streets of multi-story buildings all lined up next to each other stretching as far as the eye can see. People everywhere. Just everywhere. Doing their thing. Traffic. Lights. Noise. Steam rising from vents in the tarmac. The regular wafts of marijuana smoke. It’s a lot to take in.

Adding to that, it absolutely buckets down with rain on our first day. As we’re driving over to Manhattan from Queens, our driver narrowly misses getting stuck in traffic that can’t budge because of a flooded road (complete with floating car) and we get emergency texts to our phones about flash flooding. It also means that our plans are somewhat thwarted: both the New York Hall of Science and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum where Sim had planned to take Aelie are closed, and my plan to take the subway from our accommodation in midtown down to the 9/11 monument and museum is a no-go, with many disruptions to the network. Instead, I walk the hour in sometimes drenching rain, my mini umbrella from Japan barely making a dent. My shoes and backpack are absolutely drenched by the time I get there. But I make it in time for my tour!

The 9/11 monument and museum are very moving and sombre. Everyone alive at the time remembers that day. It was so shocking. Seeing the physical remnants - the monument, the buckled steel indented with the conical nose shape of one of the planes - helps a little with my processing, but when I visit the internal spaces with documentation and items from that time and records of the people who died, I realise it’s just too big to fully make sense of it all. The main thing I take away from my visit is the respect paid to those who lost their lives - the names of the deceased etched into the memorial have been painstakingly placed near their loved ones, friends and colleagues rather than in random or alphabetical order; the staff go out before visitors arrive to place a white rose at the name of those whose birthday it is that day; and there’s an artwork with a tile for each person who lost their lives, each painted a different shade of blue to represent the collective memory of ‘just how blue the sky was’ that day.

There’s a lot to cover for the rest of our short time here, so here are some snapshots:

The weird and visually arresting Oculus building that erupts from it’s multi-story, below ground chambers onto the street like a giant, prehistoric bird…

Delicious, buoyant cookies from Levain cookies that take 3 sittings to finish…

Striding across Manhattan Bridge with great views of the Brooklyn Bridge along the way (I could juuuuust see the Statue of Liberty in the distance), wandering around Dumbo (which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), finally tasting a familiar coffee at Bluestone Lane cafe set up by a Melbourne-native, and catching up with a school friend (Shanon) and chatting while our kids played at their school (it was great to get a tiny sense for what it might be like living here and also fun to discover that her parents were fellow teachers and in a local acting group with Sim’s parents in Colac back in the day)…

Brunch with an old buddy from university (Kamil) at a fancy institution, Lafayette Grand Cafe and Bakery, and walking the High Line with Sim’s friend from a semester at Leicester University (Kat)…

Having our first overseas voting experience (for the Voice referendum 😔), visiting the Museum of Modern Art and finding new inspiration in Georgia O’Keeffe, seeing the Manhattan skyline through sunset at Top of the Rock, battling through Times Square and trying a famous deli sandwich…