Last week, my family and I jumped onto a plane to visit my brother, who is partaking in a summer fellowship at one of the medical schools in Manhattan. This plane was having trouble with one of its cargo doors, so I was tragically torn away from the seat that I took 2 hours to get acquainted with to board yet another trusty jet. During the announcement in which the captain was asking us to deplane, I was musing academically about how we, in a large metal capsule of steel and various engine parts, could possibly be afloat in the air. Funny enough, there was a woman one row back who was screaming the ears off of her poor 20-something year old son that didn't have so much as a clue about how to fix the cargo door of a commercial airplane. I imagine his mother was wondering the opposite. And by "opposite" I mean the absolute injustice that the crew would dare keep us waiting. The poor son looked about as flushed as the big apple we were meant to fly to.
Not to keep you in suspense, but we got there, 7 hours and two cups of Minute Maid OJs later...
Having spent a year abroad hopping from European city to European city exposed me to about as much cosmopolitan atmosphere as one really needs to get a grasp of navigating subways and landmarks, so being in NYC wasn't a sensory overload as I imagine it would be for some. I felt more at home, in fact. I love the towering skyscrapers looming over one way avenues, making four lane streets look narrow. The nonchalance of jaywalkers dodging equally-determined cars to get home brings a busy disorder to the strategically-designed grid.
Planning my trip at the butt-end of June meant facing the start of the notorious heat of the City. Though not comparable to the sweltering humidity in areas of East Asia, the temperature in New York City combined with the close quarters of your fellow sardines marching about in a can of sweat, loosed neckties and tourists was slightly less than comfortable. Hydrating is of the essence and the key to good travel in this season.
As many of you know, I strongly believe that tasting the city you're experiencing is equally as important as seeing or hearing it, so my brother obliged to taking me to partake in his favourite street food: halal chicken and lamb over rice.
Halal food is food that is considered palatable by people of muslim faith, and boy, is it tasty. Unlike the food carts that I'm used to seeing in San Diego, these carts actually differed in the way their fare tasted. One of the carts on Ave of the Americas was simpler than another closer to 2nd and 65th, which was far more aromatic and packed with earthy spices. The former, I would argue, is more tourist friendly, or westernised. Still very amazing. Possibly one of my favourite foods that I sampled in the Big Apple.
My other food cart experience started with me trying to relive the quintessential patronage of the hot dog cart. I probably visited the wrong cart because it turned out to be a wrong decision. Or I suppose NYC has moved on to bigger and better things other than the American wurst. Bland and disappointing, the unexciting hot dog sadly stared me in the face as I regretted using precious stomach space and moved on to set my eyes on bigger and better things...
Meet Ippudo's ramen! Just looking at the broth here is making me salivate. The noodle house had a line outside the door before it even opened, but we happily jumped in, anticipating our taste buds to be floored. I was referred to this place by some friends, and seeing the queue just made the hype even more real. The ambiance of the restaurant was modern with Japanese flair, as appropriate: ramen is not just the name for the dehydrated instant noodles you can pick up from your local market or 99 Cents store-- ramen is a Japanese take on Chinese noodles and is frequently served with generous toppings of pork belly, green onions, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, etc... Sometimes the broth, which is made from luxuriously stewing the pork belly, is simmered for 60 hours, beckoning the richest of flavours. Topped with various accoutrements and steeped in a classic miso tinted broth, the homemade noodles makes Ippudo's ramen worthy of a bow.
My only bone to pick with the place is the price. Maybe Manhattan is just getting used to having the luxury of ramen houses. Maybe I'm just spoiled in SoCal that getting an expensive bowl of ramen will cost you $9. Spending $15 on a bowl is a splurge.
On to dessert!
To satisfy the sweets-sectors of our taste palettes, we bounced around the notorious haunts: Amorino for spectacular gelato, Magnolia's to take a whack at the cupcakes and lemonbars, Veneiro's for their house cannoli, Milk to sample their famous crack pie, Quickly's to partake in Taiwanese boba and Laudrée for the colourful little miracles known as macarons.
I like macarons. Enough to have gone on a quest to make them myself and Laudrée, the original macaroner, of course, is going to be the best I've ever had. Not only that, but it was a way for me to check my own cookies against the original. Result? I'm not doing bad...
I do have to warn the casual foodie, however... expect to drop around $70 for a box of two dozen macs. They are the most pretentious little cookies on the face of the planet. Every time I make a batch, I stare at them as if I'd just birthed a baking tray full of little children, each meticulously carried and had their guts piped into them.
In the middle of our trip, we were fortunate enough to swing by Hillsong's Salvation Army Theatre for a Sunday evening service. So was the rest of NYC. The queue to get into the building stretched down the street and wrapped around the block! To my good luck, Banning Liebscher of Jesus Culture was speaking that night. Contain myself, I could not. That, and the great worship, completely made it worth it.
Ah, the shopping in the Big Apple... not that I'm not constantly surrounded by shopping centres, markets and malls wherever I go (come to think of it, it would be a MASSIVE challenge to travel somewhere and not be faced with commercial commerce). Madison, Fifth, Union... all areas loaded with flagship stores. From Japan's Uniqlo to Britain's TopShop to H&M to Gucci to Chloé, your senses and wallets will be absolutely bombarded with summer "sales," and this is all outside of Sak's Fifth. Do note, however, that these shopping districts aren't your basic indulgences. Manhattan is Manhattan. Unless you're dressed the part with your Louboutins and Hermes handbag, don't expect to be paid a terrible lot of attention to. Frankly, I'm alright with this. I don't need someone to tell me what I can afford and what I need to sell my Civic to buy. Nonetheless, still a more comfortable experience than in China where my friends and I nearly got punched out for haggling.
For those not interested in looking like a tourist whatsoever, you can take on the disposition of a flaneur, or more casually, a people-watcher. Central Park is ideal for that type of travel, as it stretches on forever, contains both tourists and locals, and is a moderate escape from the heat that's neither a store nor a museum.
Like London's Hyde Park, Central Park boasts many statues, that of the whimsical and the memorial type. From Alice in Wonderland to Balto to European royalty, the Park's got it all. Not to mention the zoo, a castle and various bodies of water in which radio-controlled sailboats, ducks, and algae can be found.
You might ask about Times Square, and to that I would say, only for a quick picture and a thousand dollars would I ever go there again. The Square is a cocktail of electronic billboards advertising, well... advertisements. Everything from plays to vodka to banking. Krakauer would be proud of how far the spectacle has come. It's the Genghis Khan of nightmarish constipations of tourists in their socks and sandals, waving sad and beaten city maps in vain efforts to brush the humidity from their sunburnt sarcophaguses. You may be surprised at how small or how big it actually is, depending on your ability to be fooled by cameras, but that astonishment will wane quickly to be replaced by your frustration of the crowds, milling about like armies of blind ants going in every which way they please, or don't please. (I honestly think the trouble is that people walking around the area realise that every direction they head in is one they don't want to be going in, but in frustration they change their route, making yet the same mistake again.) Nonetheless, it is a frustrating site, topped with cheesy costumed characters whose trademarks are about as real as maraschino cherries.
A tourist site that I could sponsor more than a trip to Times Square would be the NBC tour at 30 Rockefeller Center. Not entirely sure of how popular the tours were, I was able to reserve tickets for an afternoon that very morning via phone. The tour is led by NBC pages, who have gone through a notoriously competitive process to land the most thankless job in the company. Despite how strenuous various articles and interviews make the job sound, I believe there's much more glory at the end of the tunnel for these hardworking pages. The tour takes you through various studios, depending on the day and season during which you visit and at the end, you're privileged to a special surprise in which the pages select two volunteers from among your group. I will leave the surprise for you to discover, but my youngest brother and I were picked from among the bunch. If you're not familiar with tv/film production, it will be quite the experience. Even if you are, it's still a fun activity to partake in, so when the page asks for volunteers, raise your hand. If you're shy, all the better!
I'd like to end the entry with something I applaud NYC for: their subway system. Being from LA, where the public transit system has much room for improvement, the subway is a breath of freshly circulated and exhausted air (as bad as that sounds, it was actually meant as a compliment). The convenience at which I was allowed through the subway transit wasn't as much as that of London, but the wee bit of extra walking never killed anyone... I think. I missed having a person at every single tube entrance and exit directing and redirecting tourists towards the correct line, but NYC, I suppose, expects everyone to be wearing their big boy and big girl pants to man up and figure it out. Nonetheless, the lines are simple enough to figure out--the one aspect that may take getting used to is figuring out which lines are local and which skip stops. Regardless of this, subway maps are still a mountainous feat of design expertise. Truly.
Could I live in Manhattan? Short answer, yes. I love the cityscape. And being in my younger years, I think I'd be able to handle it better now than later (physically yes, financially no). There's something to be said about being able to pat yourself on the back for making it in such a fast-paced rhythm, and feeling how small you actually are amongst the world's population is easy, as long as you're not given to feeling too insignificant. Living and breathing around that many people every day is humbling, but dangerous in some ways, as you have no choice but to somehow forget that the bodies around you are significant. Rationalising the existence of others allows our minds to cope with how small we are, but it has proved to be one of the most destructive and lethal defaults in the history of humanity. That being said, the fact that NYC, among other enormous metropolitan cities, thrives in light of this just demonstrates that there is goodness in the world.
