I recently had the opportunity to live in New York City for about 45 days and I am writing this article to share my experience. The city has this mysterious charm in it’s air that makes you fall in love with it almost instantly. It’s warm, open, welcoming and emits a lot of positive energy that you end up soaking. Just strolling down a street in lower Manhattan fills your heart with a strong sense of ambition to dream big and motivates you to work towards achieving your goals. No wonder it attracts people from across the globe who are trying to make it big in their lives.
You cannot help but appreciate the fact that how the media fittingly calls New York City as America’s melting pot as you see people around you from different parts of the society, across various ethnicities, nationalities and backgrounds working and living there together in harmony. It’s just a beautiful feeling. The trip was indeed an experience of a lifetime.
Before you read ahead, I’d like to give you a heads-up I am not going to write this article as a travel guide and so wouldn’t focus too much on the detailing of the logistics involved. It’s more focused on sharing my experience of living in NYC.
The Travel
This was my first solo international travel and it was a thick mixture of excitement, anxiety, nervousness and fatigue. It was an exhausting 22 hours flight from Mumbai to Newark with a layover in Hong Kong. The primary reason for my trip was meeting my girlfriend after almost 2 years. The anticipation of seeing her after a long time was such that I could feel the butterflies in my stomach and I ended up being awake for the entirety of the flight.
I had done my homework about international air travel stuff like security checks, immigration, luggage transfers, etc. and most part of it went through as expected barring a few deviations. Exactly a day and half after I had left Mumbai, I was finally in the United States of America!
Landing in New York
Towards the end of the flight when the captain finally announced that we’ll be landing in 20 minutes I was so excited that I could feel my heart racing. It was night time and I opened up the window flaps to see the view outside and I could see a perfect grid of roads lit up by thousands of street lights. I was enthralled by the feeling that I am finally going to step upon US land and that the view in front of me is indeed the real US was just overwhelming. It was like coming to a dream world that I had only heard of and seen about in television.
It literally took me almost 45 minutes for this feeling of fascination to sink in and it finally ended when the immigration officer started my interview. I cleared the procedures, collected my luggage and headed out of the airport terminal. I finally saw my girl, hugged her tightly and it was pure unadulterated bliss!
The Skyline
If you say New York, the one thing that pops up right away in my mind is the city’s magnificent skyline. It’s just mesmerizing to look at. If I were to summarize New York in a single word, it would be skyscrapers! Super tall buildings and other architectural marvels define the city like nothing else.
The city is so well planned that it is home to ~50 skyscrapers, some of which are the tallest in the world, and yet no part of the city feels cramped at all. Lower Manhattan, the power center of New York and probably the US, is where most of these towers are and this is what makes up the famous skyline that is depicted in modern media and culture.
During my stay, I spent a majority of my time doing nothing else but just staring at those mind boggling structures and appreciating their architectural beauties and engineering feats. I just couldn’t seem to get enough of those buildings. Those structures somehow evoked a strange sense of inspiration and motivation in me. I don’t know if that is what they are supposed to do, but for me they did.
World Trade Center
One particular building that strikingly stands out and captured my imagination was the glorious One World Trade Center. It stands tall and proud with a hint of fortitude. Its built on the land where the renowned twin towers once stood before the 9/11 attacks. The building is so huge that when I went to see it for the first time I was standing right underneath it and did not realize it until I looked up straight into the sky with my head tilted backward at almost a right angle and yet I could not see the top.
I spent 5 full days in the vicinity of the building just strolling around and experiencing the vibe there. It was a wonderful feeling and though I had no formal connection with WTC or NYC or even the US for that matter, I still experienced a sense of belonging. I was so engrossed that I felt like I belonged there. The building has a memorial and a museum in its premises dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. I paid a visit to the museum and spent an entire day there learning about the history of the city, the twin towers, how the attacks unfolded and the spirit of New Yorkers in the face of diversity.
I experienced a plethora of emotions while I was in the museum right from agony, sympathy to pride. The World Trade Center has made a special place in my heart forever.
The Subway
Immediately after skyscrapers, if there is anything else that defines the city then its the subway. Its a rapid transit system built fully underground that serves as the nervous system of the city and helps millions of commuters to travel across different parts of the city.
Incidentally, my first subway travel happened in a solo, unplanned way where I had to reach midtown from the World Trade Center station which in itself is an architectural marvel of sorts. Its built recently, officially known as the “Oculus” and serves as a multi modal terminal station. Getting to the subway stations requires us to enter a down stair pathway located at various points throughout the city. I entered the one at Oculus and bought myself a Metro card (another famous city icon) and recharged it with $20.
Now to my sheer horror, the subway system consists of multiple lines named alphabetically, numerically and also color coded! For the kind of person I am, a situation like this immediately triggers my anxiety and OCD kicks-in and my brain hastily scrambles to meticulously organize the information at hand. This OCD powered exercise is something I simultaneously love and hate doing till the point of exhaustion and beyond. It feels good to know everything in detail but its consumes a lot mental resources.
But this time, I did not have the time and had to reach my destination on time. Luckily enough for me my girl is an excellent fast thinker who can make quick sense of information at hand and take action immediately. I am always enchanted by this ability of hers and when it comes to moving around quickly in a city I fully rely upon her superpower. Standing clueless at the subway station staring around at trains passing by and reading all the naming boards and indicators, I took my phone out and started reading all the messages (read instructions) that my girl had sent me to reach my destination. But for me reading the instructions in theory and quickly implementing it in real world without confirming is a challenging task.
Nevertheless, I followed the messages coupled with finding my way around by asking other people for directions I finally reached the “E” line and boarded the train. I was proud of myself (I know it’s silly) but I was! Afterall, I was travelling in the New York Subway all by myself.
Finally I reached my destination, the journey was nice, the stations were clean, people in the subway car were civil and well-mannered (something I noticed immediately as its not normal business for a person who travels in Mumbai trains). Over the course of my stay, I traveled mostly by subway across multiple lines and by the end of my trip I knew the naming system and routes intuitively.
There are many other places that I would like to write about like the Times Square, New York Stock Exchange, Statue of Liberty, etc. but I think I will keep that for a separate post since this blog is already long enough.