lost

New York is big.

Don’t laugh; I’m serious. You can know in your head that NY is the biggest city in the US, but you can’t actually have a sense for that enormity until you try to traverse the metropolis for yourself. Having spent yesterday crisscrossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn to the Bronx and back again, and today going to all 4 corners of Manhattan, I finally feel like I’ve gained some perspective on size. A little too much perspective, if truth be told.

Today was our first full day off and, since it turned out to be absolutely gorgeous out, the 5 of us went on an Adventure. Goal #1: take the Staten Island ferry. In theory, that should have been a matter of taking the #1 train to the end of the line and hopping on the boat. In reality, it was a 2 hour odyssey. An important NY lesson: the subway lines frequently change and stop without warning or explanation. All of a sudden, we found ourselves standing on 14^th St. in Greenwich Village with no idea what to do. 90 minutes later, we were finally at the ferry, having learned important NY lessons such as a) it is not, indeed, possible to walk from Greenwich Village to the ferry launch, b) West Broadway and Broadway are 2 completely different streets, and c) interns cannot afford to buy food in SoHo. An educational day indeed. And that was just the morning.

The Staten Island ferry turned out to be a marvelous (and free!!) way to sightsee. As far as we could tell, only about 1% of the people on the boat actually got off on the island (if there’s anything worth doing near the port, we didn’t find it); the point is purely to gorge yourself on the view. It was breathtaking to see all the things I’d only ever read about – Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Financial District seen from the water. Pictures soon to follow.

In the afternoon, we explored Eastern Manhattan (and I mean that in the broadest sense possible). We disembarked at 42^nd St., spent 45 minutes trying to find the public library (it shouldn’t really have been that difficult, but it’s terribly easy to get lost when you don’t know which order the avenues go in…), which turned out to be closed. Our next adventure was the Guggenheim, which is pay-what-you-want for a couple of hours on Saturday night. As it turned out, the museum was in the middle of an exhibit shift, so there were only 2 open galleries. But for $1, who cares? It would have been worth it just to see the architecture. After ducking into Central Park to watch the sun set over the lake (pond? I confess to not knowing where exactly we were), I was more than ready to go home (I’ll spare you the exciting details of the bus ride from East Harlem to West Harlem. In a word, it was…colorful).

I apologise for posting a succession of long, rather aimless entries. I expect I’ll be able to focus them more as I become at least somewhat accustomed to the endless movement and excitement of my new home, but for now everything is still an adventure.