I've moved to Glasgow now, which I find much less stressful than London for various reasons. I just kind of wish I hadn't moved to such a bad neighborhood. It's really negative there, adults and kids screaming at each other, and lots of unfriendly dusty old pubs. According to Megan, who I live with, people in Govan don't really understand the concept of being quiet, so even the librarians in the library talk loudly... but I'm glad to live with Megan and her two cats, Temper and Bichette. And I hope to get in shape from cycling more places.
Now, two weeks later, I'm visiting the US! I took a flight into New York, to spend a couple of days there visiting a few people and seeing the city. I flew KLM, the Dutch airline, via Amsterdam--somehow the feeling of being in the Amsterdam airport was exciting to me. It had been so long since I'd seen signs predominantly in a different language. I was sitting next to someone on the plane who was fluent in English and Dutch--her English was so Scottish you couldn't tell she was actually from the Netherlands. KLM is very proud of being Dutch and offers a choice of Dutch movies, music, and cakes during the flight.
In New York, I stayed with my friend Jon from Oberlin who is an amazing cook and plays various brass instruments (or is it just the trumpet? He has a wall of trumpets.) He lives in Brooklyn, near Prospect Park. There wasn't much damage from the hurricane visible; a glass pot with a plant in it on his front steps was knocked over. Farther away, in the Botanical Gardens with Jon and Cal, we saw a row of large trees uprooted on the ground.
Jon and I stopped by the Occupy Sandy station nearest to where he lives. I'd brought a suitcase full of ramen and cup soup and things for the victims of Sandy, but they were completely dwarfed by the church full of stuff that I was confronted with. That was a beautiful church, a Unitarian church with a huge round stained-glass window. I thought Unitarians weren't Christian, but this one definitely used a lot of Christian symbolism. They were sending groups out to various high-rise apartment buildings with food, water and blankets, trying to help people. We had a volunteer orientation from somebody who was pretty patronizing, but spent most of our two hours there being part of human chains unloading supplies from trucks into the building. Apparently Occupy has set up a wishlist on Amazon so that anyone can donate what they need. Clever.
That evening, I tried to meet up with my friend Ali, but apparently there are two 5th Avenues in New York, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan. Since I didn't know this, I trusted Google maps to tell me where to go, and then when the place I ended up wasn't Gorilla Coffee, I had to scramble around to find a phone with internet to set me on the right track, since my British phone couldn't receive American frequencies. I ended up at Best Buy, where the helpful shop assistants tried to tell me that a phone that said it had web capability couldn't get on the internet, because the web is different from the internet. They got more frustrated when I said that didn't make sense--they seemed to think you could only reach the T-mobile online store. Which reminds me, I should top up my phone account at bit... I finally talked to someone who knew things and got a cheap phone. Thinking of taking it back, though, since it doesn't have an alarm!
After I sorted that out, it was too late, ze had gone home. I even called the coffee shop to have hir paged. Sigh. So I went for gluten-free pizza at Viva Herbal pizza. It was so good I got another huge slice. "New Yorkers don't f*** around with pizza," Jon says.
The next day... what happened. Oh yes, Jon went to work and I went to Central Park. Got a bit lost, but went to the John Lennon memorial, which is a mosaic that says "Imagine" set into the path. I hope that someday people will have forgotten Lennon and will just think that we really valued creativity.
Then I walked south along 7th avenue, past delis and pizza parlours... I wasn't hungry but I just wanted to look at the food. We don't have food like that in Britain. In Britain, all the supermarkets are clean and white and modern-looking, the foods politely lined up on the shelves. Even the chip shop is no-nonsense. We use words like "tempting" to describe food, "nice," little words. Americans, on the other hand... because we're so puritan about everything else, food is our only outlet. Sure, we can use sinful words (like "being good" about calories). But like everything else, it's expansive. Food is "good." Everything is twice as big. Sandwiches are piled high, salads are full of fat... "gorge yourself," it all seems to say. Or is that just my relatives. I went for frozen yoghurt with my cousin Megan in Iowa city, and not only did they have six flavours of ice cream, but they had about fifty toppings, sauces, sprinkles--chocolate chips, cookies, fruit, tiny mochi, strawberry and passionfruit pearls that burst juice in your mouth... the US loves food. Britain has the 5th of November, which is about fireworks, the US has Thanksgiving, which is about stuffing yourself (and some history on the side).
I got to Times Square, which is oddly beautiful in its way, a big clean-swept triangle of granite underfoot and all around you screens, beautiful people leaning down to wink just for you. You almost feel like you're in a television studio yourself, you're part of it all. Scale becomes very confusing. I visited Macy's just to walk to the top, for no reason. It was pretty boring, there wasn't anything to see up there, except the Christmas section crammed full of red and green. The escalators were interesting, though; they got more ancient the farther up you went, again unlike our clean modern British stores. You wouldn't catch Selfridge's with a creaky old escalator furnished entirely of wood, showing its age through yellowing and scuff marks.
Down I went again and south to Union Square. I caught up with Jon again at the Strand bookshop, which has racks of books outside the door for 50 cents, $1, and $2. We also went to some thrift stores that were too expensive. After that, he went home and I went to a queer film festival in Brooklyn, and saw a confusing but beautiful Swedish film about snails and androgyny. There was also a lot of glitter. I ran into Cal again and also Cristie, an amazing artist who I saw at Ladyfest in Edinburgh once. I went home early, though, because I was in the midst of catching a cold.
The next day it was on to Iowa. But I think I'll stop here for now.
