Thoughts on exploring New York

Excerpts from my travel journal:

Aug 30th, 2009.
I'm not exactly sure of how I want to go about exploring New York. Sometimes I feel like I want to go and see all the famous spots that for years made me dream of one day coming here. I'm not only talking about the monuments, buildings, streets and museums, but also of all the TV locations, celebrity hangouts, legendary restaurants.....

But then I think, do I really want to spend what little time I have here chasing a dream?

After all, I never eat at Maxim's in Paris, rarely ever walk on the rue Montaigne and in all my years living there I've only been to the top of the Eiffel tower once.

Why not use my time here instead discovering what life would be like if I lived here and set about going/doing to the regular places/things I'd probably go/do in real life. Walk and explore neighborhoods where everyday life is happening (lined with schools, grocery marts, laundry shops, corner cafes...), eat at little unpretentious restaurants with an interesting menu instead of trying to get reservations at Nobu or Cipriani. Shopping at stores that don't make me stand in line 15 mins on the sidewalk before going in (Abrecombie & Fitch on 5th avenue in case you're interested).....Going to everyday places, walking on normal streets, eating at regular food joints... assume I am a local and as such, going to see the Friends' building corner and taking my picture in front of the Seinfeild deli would certainly not be part of my everyday activities....

But then again.... wouldn't pretending to live an everyday, regular life here also qualify as chasing a dream?


Aug 31st, 2009.
As I walk in New York, I keep being confronted with similarities between the city and Europe. This of course is nothing extraordinary considering the history of the foundation of the city, but I can't help having the same awkward feeling I had when we were in Santiago, earlier this year... as if I'm seeing things from a distant yet at the same time quite familiar point of view....

I can't put my finger on it exactly, but I can sort of feel it.... walking in certain neighborhoods with streets lined with what at first glance seem like typical London Victorian-styled houses and yet, upon closer inspection you notice the extensive use of steel and iron (stemming I suppose from the ''boom'' years in the early 20th century); the symmetrical, almost clean cut style in otherwise clearly influenced Haussmannian buildings; the way streets in the lower part of Manhattan are winding and criss-crossed as they are in Europe and yet as you go up north they become parallel and symmetrical... even the large buildings, not the modern skyscrapers of course, but the tall massive buildings you see sprinkled all around town, seem to suggest that their architects had been to Europe and come back to NY with the intention of creating buildings with all the elegant and fancy design worthy of a Piccadilly Circus or Avenue d'Opéra building and yet with cleaner lines, more precise, grander, taller, ..... more modern.

In this respect, New York feels to me like what modern Europe would probably look life if she had at one point decided to give in to Botox. It's as if New Yorkers decided that the city they wanted to build would be one that acknowledged all the beauty and elegance of their ancestor's home countries but at the same time clearly overcame the limitations and shortcomings that its predecessors hadn't been able to, betting instead on modernity, grandness and awe-inspiring.


Fned.