NYC.2

So we're back. Nine days of walking, eating and inundation of all kinds. Kind of awesome. Kind of great to be home.

There are two main components to my trip. The facts: what, where, when. And then what it all *means.* I'm torn between the two yet one can't exist without the other. I had this great plan of really sectioning off ideas but a lot of my posts this week will be big blurs.

New York was different than I expected partially because I expected it to be so different. This is what's interesting about New York. Little is surprising. Awe inspiring, overwhelming, frustrating, yes, but if you watch TV or movies you've seen New York. You know New York. You may not realize you do but you do.

What New York has is scale. There is just more of everything. More Portland Hipsters. More black people. More Thai restaurants. I feel like the culture that New York has is Portland culture...just with 8 million people. New York's originality isn't built on some uniqueness bread from the city itself. It's just the result of being...bigger.

My favorite parts of New York (beyond like the museums and galleries) were the parts that most reminded me of gentrified Portland. I hate to say it but I like the places that are probably the worst on poor people. Then on the other side of this, I liked the parts of NYC that I haven't seen a million times on every television show ever. I liked Queens (OK Ugly Betty, whatever Andrea :) I liked Brighten Beach.

Brighten Beach is one express metro stop from Coney Island and is full of Russians. It's like stepping off a plane. Signs are in Cyrillic. Everything in the little grocery stores are labeled in Cyrillic. Don't read Cyrillic? Well then you guess. And guess we did. When we were ordering from a deli counter and trying to ask what didn't have meat in it the lady helping us actually called over another employee who spoke better English. Finally I said "w/o meat" in Slovak and it was close enough to Russian to cause them to look first surprised, then laugh, then shake their heads "no." But holy hell, they made poppy seed cake like my host moms in Slovakia. What a treat.

Queens was the only place in NYC where we saw a mixing of race. Manhattan has people of all colors, but those people all fall down particular slots like those coin machines we had as children. Drop in a dime and it slides into the dime column. Drop in a nickel and it goes to a different, nickel, column. Once Zach pointed out that it was only young black men who stood on guard for camera flashes inside the museums did that become radiantly clear. And it was everywhere. Although even in Queens Zach said all the dish washers in the Thai restaurant were Latinos. But it felt different somehow. In Manhattan, black people and white people ride the elevator together but all the black people might as well get off at one floor of the building while the white people continue on up. To continue the analogies: Queens felt like tossed salad. Much of NYC felt like people lived parallel lives never to touch.

This was in part why Queens was amazing. There were little neighborhoods of influence (Indians above a certain street number, central americans below a certain street number) but people seemed to be actually living together. Whether or not there are racial tensions, that may be a whole different issue. But it felt different than Manhattan.

Also what I loved about Queens and Brighten Beach is that people actually LIVED there. Williamsburg (birth place of the dark rimmed classes and the hipster) and parts of the Lower East Side had an average age of probably 24. A whole micro civilization of 24 year olds. But in Brighten Beach and Queens there were people, gasp, in their 40s and 50s and 60s. (Hell in Brighten Beach the average age was probably 60 and that's just because I saw a few babies that pull the scale from all the 70 year olds.) People grocery shopping. People going to and from work. Not that people don't go to and from work in Manhattan or Williamsburg or Prospect Park but it wasn't like you'd think there must be a college 2 blocks away.

I think the fact that real people with real families made those areas not only interesting but accessible. A lot of New York wasn't accessible to me. Like a piece of art work you don't connect with. You can look at it and break it down technically but that thing that connects you with it emotionally isn't there. I think this would change if I lived there. I know a lot of my perspective comes from making snap judgments on first impressions.