New York

[We've now left the East Coast of America, and with good wireless access, fewer distractions and a less packed schedule, I will be making some serious attempts at catching up with our posts. We're now in San Francisco, but before we left the East Coast we managed to get to Niagara Falls, Amish country in Pennsylvania, and Independence Day celebrations in Washington D.C., Philadelphia and New York. But more on that soon. For now, you'll have to make do with my first New York post, our first post in a very long time.]

Arriving in New York is an experience that cannot be replicated in any other city or even continent. Many residents simply call Manhattan ‘The City’, without any other label or justification, and I don’t think any other name is more appropriate. It is The City, with capital letters: it is the World’s premier city, the original to which so many modern metropolises take their foundations and cues. If you were doing a worldwide tour of cities only – or at least, western cities only – then you’d only have to take one look at Manhattan Island to blow the rest completely out of the water.

We’ve been to some of – if not the vast majority – of major Western cities on this trip, but none of them outdoes New York City for sheer grandness, style, culture, or just that raw feeling of aliveness and energy that you get from big cities. London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Dublin, Stockholm – none of them come close. Even Hong Kong, the one city in the world that outdoes New York on the skyscraper headcount, doesn’t quite feel the same. It’s intangible, but I’m certain that anyone who has spent any time in The City will feel the same.

We arrived in the USA late in the afternoon, and after customs, who took our photo and our fingerprints, we took the ‘A’ Train to our hostel at around sunset. We are situated a little out of the main hustle and bustle of Manhattan, but not too far not to be a short subway ride in. For those of you who know New York geography, it’s the corner of Broadway and 101st – so about halfway down Central Park, in other words.

All we wanted to do on our first evening was eat and then pass out – we were still on European time, and despite the early hour in New York, it felt about 1:30AM for us. So, we ventured out half a block and found the most stereotypical New York diner there was and settled in to a burger and fries each. Unfortunately, the real reason that I’m relating this otherwise uneventful story is that it was our first encounter with American food servings, which are routinely big enough to feed a small town during the Great Depression. On TV, later in our trip, I saw an ad for a reality TV program called ‘Man versus Food’, and I think a more perfect encapsulation of American eating habits could not be found. However, being used to making the most of the smaller European food sizes, I gulped the whole thing down in about three minutes and proceeded to feel extremely ill – and extremely full – for the next two days.

The next morning, thanks to the wonderful phenomenon of jetlag, we awoke bright-eyed and ready for the day at about 6:00AM. Jetlag really is okay as long as you are travelling westwards, and not crossing the international dateline: it just means you wake up really early. Travel the other way, however, means that you constantly lose hours and wake to find yourself with your face in your midday sandwich, and later feel ready for a bowl of cornflakes and a fair shake at the day at about one in the morning. Not to mention the Dr. Who-like experience of crossing the international dateline, where you can start on one side perfectly happy and end up arriving weeks later at your destination, grasping a calendar disbelievingly and wondering where all that time went. I hear it’s just like middle-age.

In any case, we decided to make the most of our newly-found earlybird status and join the rest of corporate-yuppie Manhattan in a jog around Central Park. That is, they jogged, and we Central-Parked. It seems like the pastime of The City’s rich and the aspiring rich is to go for a run around the Jackie O. reservoir between six and nine AM. It’s nothing if not interesting to people watch: some obviously do this all the time without any problem whatsoever; for these people, the jog is more of a chance to socialise, to display their obscene fitness, and compare themselves with their running-buddies. Then there are the dog walkers, who run/walk with steely determination as four canines – none of which they own – scuttle under their feet, making halfhearted attempts at local squirrels. Then there is the occasional guy who very clearly fits into the more-than-50% of Americans who are overweight, and who desperately need to run rings around Jackie O. in order not to depart for That Great City In The Sky at a very young age. We saw one of these that morning: dressed in the one sweatshirt in Manhattan that was very clearly living up to its name, and panting like a Gorilla trying to blow out a stick of incense.

After seeing the John Lennon memorial in Strawberry Fields, and pretending to be local and picking up a bagel and coffee for breakfast, we embarked on perhaps our longest day of walking so far. Before we succumbed to the temptation of the subway, we had walked all the way from our hostel at 101st (New York works like a grid, counting down the streets the further to the tip you get) to the luxury of 5th Avenue before catching the subway to Battery Park. On that first day we saw a fair chunk of Manhattan in an attempt to get us orientated: everything from the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Lincoln Centre, Time Square, Broadway, Wall Street, City Hall, Ground Zero, Radio City Music Hall and the Rockefeller Centre.

All were amazing, but no single attraction equals the sheer atmosphere of Manhattan itself. Just walking around the streets, where every turn reveals yet more huge buildings that cut off the horizon is impressive enough to warrant several weeks spent in New York City.

Late in the afternoon, when we were close to giving it in after nearly twelve hours of straight tourism, we caught the ferry to Staten Island and back. A ferry like this should be a staple of every city: free, and with great views of both the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan itself into the bargain. As we departed, the sun was just setting. It was beautiful.

The next day, we went to Harlem. This was the opposite of our first day in New York in many ways: not only is it on the other side of the island from most of the regular, first day attractions, but we also did less traditional tourism. Harlem, apart from anything, is a place of tremendous history and importance to American – and worldwide – culture. Literature, theatre, dance, film, but most of all, music, all owe a tremendous debt to this Manhattan suburb. As the centre of Black life in New York – and possibly America, New Orleans aside – it was home to blues, jazz, soul and funk during their formative years. Although there wasn’t much on when we visited, seeing the Apollo Theatre was inspiring, where so many artists took stage (including James Brown), and where only a few days later an impromptu crowd would gather to sing and dance and variously react to the news of Michael Jackson’s death.

Harlem has become gentrified over the last few years, which has greatly reduced both the suburb’s crime rate and its dangerous image, though I don’t think it will ever forget its past. Sidestreets still look like the setting of any given Spike Lee film, all wide-stepped entryways and bright colours, and there are still streets like Malcolm X Boulevard snaking their way through Harlem’s centre.

One of the most unique things we were able to do in Harlem was to go to the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture. The centre functions as a public research library, and as an exhibition hall of sorts, centred around the Black history of Harlem. What made the centre so interesting for us, or more precisely, for Tash, is that a large amount of the primary documents that Tash used for her Honours Thesis are held at the Schomburg Centre, so we visited in the hope of seeing some of them in the flesh. There were two exhibitions on when we visited: one on migration patterns of present-day Africa, the most moving part of which was a photo gallery focussing on African migrants in Europe; and a detailed exhibition showcasing the history of a Baptist Church in Harlem, which had seen the highs and lows of the suburb over the last 150 years. After we’d viewed the exhibitions, Tash bluffed our way into the special collections area to view some of the photos not on display that she’d used in her thesis. The woman on the desk was very helpful, getting her Tash a library card, giving a brief history of the Centre, and recommending some collections for Tash to view. It was pretty amazing, and a pretty unique experience for Tash to be able to physically view these original, 100-year-old photos of the Harlem Renaissance. She even had to wear white gloves to handle the photos.

That night we treated ourselves to dinner at a vegetarian place Lonely Planet had recommended in the suburb of Chelsea. The various suburbs of New York are nothing if not varied: if Harlem is even now a little dilapidated but elegant, with wide open streets and tall townhouses, then Chelsea is a huge contrast. It is very chic, with smaller streets and very well kept buildings with lots of greenery overlooking them. The dinner was delicious (and expensive!) but the experience alone was something to remember. We were greeted by exactly the type of distracted doorperson you see in Sex & the City, who summed us up with a quick glance and ummed and ahhed about whether they could possibly make room for us before eventually disappearing for a period and returning to say that we could indeed have one of the many empty tables. Then, a gentleman sporting a long pony-tail arrived, introduced himself as ‘Stone’ and informed us that he’d be our ‘server’ for this evening. He then wanted to double-check “if filtered tank water would be okay for you this evening?”, which of course it was.

Our food, of course, turned out to be wonderful. Their speciality was something called seitan, which I had never heard of before (and neither had many of the customers, judging by their questions), which is a protein not unlike soy but with a meaty texture. I must admit, however, that the best part of the meal was not the food but the beer I had. It was an organic beer from Maine, and despite being only a touch more expensive than a regular beer, was probably the best I’ve ever tried. There were so many flavours going on that it was really more like drinking a wine than a beer. It was incredible, though I doubt I’ll ever be able to find it again. It was, unfortunately, my first attempt at trying North American beer, which would not be so pleasurable once I later got on to the more mainstream stuff.

It’s about now that I should mention that despite food’s relative inexpense in the States, you can end up paying quite a lot more than you’d originally bargained on because of the double whammy of tip and tax. Tipping we expected in the States: an extra 15-20% of your bill for your server is expected – nay, mandatory. This is because service staff agree to incredibly low wages – sometimes $4 an hour – in the expectation that they will make quite a bit through tax. Incredibly, service staff are taxed on an estimated amount they will recieve in tips, so if you do not tip them, they are quite literally paying for the privilege of serving you. It’s a phenomenally bad system, but it is how things work over here: if you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat. Tax, however, is one thing we weren’t expecting. Tax is added to pretty much everything, but unlike every other country we’ve been to so far, it is not included in the advertised price. So while a $8 meal might seem like a good deal, in the end you can end up paying close to $15 between tax and tip. It’s irritating, to say the least.

On our last day of our first time in New York (we would return later in the trip), we checked out of our hostel and into our meeting hotel to begin our North American tour we had prebooked months ago. We had the rest of the day free, though, so after checking in and getting a much-needed haircut (neither of us had had a cut since before we left), we wandered around the city again. This time, we spent a bit more time in Time Square: on a whim, we went into the Toys R Us there, which is the biggest in the world. It’s phenomenal: so big it actually has a ferris wheel inside – not to mention an animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex and various Manhattan landmarks built out of LEGO. We had a celebrity spotting, as we saw Lawrence Fishburne, star of many films from a minor appearance in Apocolypse Now! all the way through to The Matrix. We also booked tickets to see West Side Story on Broadway when we returned for the 5th of July. The temptation to see a Broadway show was too great, and to see one written about New York in New York even greater.

Speaking of writing about New York: I think I’ve written about enough, considering there is still a second trip to New York in store. We obviously really enjoyed our stay in Manhattan; possibly, it is right up there in a tie with Istanbul. But now, it was time to journey up the East Coast of America, through some of the most historic cities of the United States to Canada.

For more New York photos, click here.