I’m in NYC again today, comfortably ensconced in the Sheraton Midtown. I’m here for all of two days again, flying out tomorrow. I miss Mr Ben already, and I still woke up at 5:30, local time, without the sound of him trying to walk in his crib (it thumps against the wall between the bedrooms).
Last night, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t do much more than procure dinner and go to bed. The Theater District is notoriously overcrowded and overpriced, due to the high concentration of tourists. Yelp recommended the halal cart on 53rd and 6th. Yes, that is the first street vendor I’ve ever known to have their own website while still running a cart. I took my chicken, rice and lettuce to go, picked up some Tasti-d-Lite for dessert, and returned to my hotel room.
In the process though, I was thinking about why New York City feels, weirdly, familiar to me. It shouldn’t. I’m from as far away from here as you can get in terms of North American cities (and right now, Victoria does seem half a world away). The reason this city feels to me like someplace I visited in childhood, is because of all those children’s books that are set in the city, whose titles I totally can’t remember the names of. But they’re out there, dozens of them, books about children living in apartments in Manhattan, about children living in houses in Brooklyn, about Central Park, all these books that describe the city. And because of that, when I get to New York, it’s that lifetime of cultural references, starting with those books, that makes it feel more familiar than it should.
Also, sometimes, when I’m walking through Midtown, it reminds me of downtown Vancouver: the same density, the glass buildings, the thousands of people. The difference is, of course, that Vancouver backs onto the mountains and the rest of British Columbia. Manhattan flows out in all directions to suburbs across the rivers, millions of people, and no end in sight. Like Los Angeles, but with more parks and green space instead of all the roads and cement, which is KIND OF RIDICULOUS.
I think I have enough time to scoot up for a quick walk to Central Park and back down – it’s seven of the short blocks from here (streets?) I’d better get on that.
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