August 2008
We’re actually in Mexico right now but I have been too hypnotised by the gorgeous beach here in Tulum to give a toss about updating the blog to be honest. New York City was fantastic, we flew in from London on Continental Airlines to start the next part of our trip. It really is the most exhilarating, motivating, heart stopping, gob smacking experience of a city. Every time I go there I get the same jolt of voltage through its sidewalks; like they suck up and store the energy of everyone who’s ever walked there and pumps it straight back into the soles of your feet. You don’t walk around the Big Apple, you soar; a jack plug straight in to the senses. We stayed at our friend Betsy’s for the first 2 nights in her tiny East village apartment 6 floors up in a typical New York tenement building. What it lacks in square footage it makes up in character.
There’s some beautiful old Brownstones in the area, fire escapes everywhere…we’ve been to New York City before so we didn’t go to the tourist sights. This was more about seeing friends and wandering Lower Manhattan neighbourhoods….Soho, Lower East Side, East Village…and getting food poisoning (Dave) at a local Thai restaurant. The irony. All the countries we’ve travelled through so far, eating street food and from vendors cooking on the side of the road and Dave gets struck down in the richest city on earth. He was so bad he had to spend a day in bed on the inflatable mattress at Betsy’s where the spare room is so small the sides of it abutted each wall.
So we’re only here a few days but great to hang out with Kat and Jon at their Washington Heights apartment…we met several years ago and this was our first time getting together again. Met up with Quique on his lunchbreak from work in Manhattan …we first met last year in Vietnam with his girlfriend Annie.
After meeting Quique we walked around Midtown and all the way back down to the East Village. By the huge Post Office building with its rows of columns looking like a Grecian Parthenon, through Times Square at 42nd and Broadway with its looming gharish digital billboards advertising music stars, broadway shows, the stock market, brand retailers and firmly in the middle of it a NYPD precinct. They approximate that over 40 million tourists a year pour through this area. Food tucks selling pretzels, hot dogs and soft drinks…people line up at a pizza truck. And amongst it all the distinctive yellow New York City taxis weave, jumping red lights, hands on horns at the jaywalkers darting through traffic. It’s frenetic, a mayhem of noise and colour shouted insults, shouted greetings, people begging for money, suits rushing to and from towering silver office blocks reaching in to the sky…carrying styrofoam containers of fast served lunch. Everything here is fast…the only speed this city tolerates.
And then a complete contrast. We stayed a night in Maplewood New Jersey at Jeremy and Helen’s place and their sons Tigue and Finn. It was the first time we’d ever met…our old friends Dan and Andrea hooked us all up so we’d be close to the airport for an early morning flight and an opportunity to make new friends and gather for a night out eating sushi. We went for a walk with Dan…green after the steel canyons of New York City, a suburban neighbourhood with traditional American clapperboard houses.
Next morning back on a plane and back to Mexico. To visit again with Roberto at Shambala in Tulum…Dave’s favourite place and time to plan our onward route.
The Travel Diarist 