D.C. to New York City

There's nothing quite like waking up early the morning of a trip, walking out into the cold November air, and missing your first bus by thirty seconds. Fortunately, it was seven thirty in the morning, and my main bus—scheduled to take me from D.C. to New York City—wouldn't leave for another twelve hours.

With nothing better to do, I took the much slower (and cheaper) connector on its winding route through northern Virginia to Dulles Airport, and caught the transit from there to the Roslyn stop on the D.C. metro. My backpack under my seat, I sat back and read Jung.

It was the day before Thanksgiving, and life in Washington seemed to be carrying on as usual, if with coats pulled tighter and steps stiffened against the cold. Being built on land reclaimed from a swamp (your tax dollars at work), D.C. is hot and muggy in the summer and bitingly cold in the winter even when the temperature still hovers around the freezing point. The springs and their brilliant cherry blossoms are another story entirely, but that is a subject better left for April.

I spent the afternoon killing time in the National Gallery of Art, with a few hours admiring Van Gogh and Monet, and a few hours asleep in one of the lobbies. The DC2NY bus left at 7:15, and I was on board fifteen minutes early. The entire operation seemed to be run by eastern European linguists. “I am from Sweden. You are learning Russian? I know Russian. You will be fluent by spring. I learned in six weeks.” Ticking off languages on his fingers, English, Lithuanian, German, French. Ho hum. Just part of the job.

I slept most of the six hour drive, only awakening around midnight as we entered the outskirts of New York city. Thick white plumes of steam drifted up from factories in the moonlight, with the accompanying wet sawdust smell of heavy industry. We dropped through the Lincoln tunnel and pulled to a stop at Penn Station. So, with a fifty dollar bus ticket and a school vacation to blow, I stepped off the bus onto the New York City streets.

Thanksgiving morning I had breakfast with a friend I'd known back in Montana—Seanna, an NYU philosophy and art student. She'd been there since August, and was glad to show me around. I'd been used to Washington, with its squat massive neoclassical architecture and the constant smell of politics. New York—especially the Village and Lower East Side—was something else, with its narrower streets, old brick buildings, rusty fire escapes, and of course the ubiquitous yellow cabs.

As it was Thanksgiving, nearly everything was closed. Fortunately, Seanna knew French and, as a result, the owners of several of the French cafes and bars in the area. We met one of her French friends on the street. Following a liquid conversation in his language, he bid us goodbye with a wave. “Happy chicken day!”

He groped for words at our puzzled expressions. “Chicken day,” he said. “Day where you eat chicken.”

Ah. We grinned. “Happy chicken day to you too!”

After breakfast, we met up with Faisal, an NYU student from Kuwait, and three of his Kuwaiti friends, who attended schools around the states and were visiting him in New York over the break. We walked around until evening, stopping here and there for a bite to eat at one or another cafe, and then went for drinks. With as many interesting places to eat and drink as the city has to offer, it's no wonder it costs so much to live here. If the rent doesn't sink you (quite likely in Manhattan), the sheer number of opportunities to spend money will. In New York City you could go to a different restaurant every breakfast, lunch and dinner for your entire life without ever seeing them all. If that weren't enough there are the shops and street vendors, countless unique people and places.

I went to sleep that night satisfied. The soul of a city is its people, the buildings and architecture its body. One cannot know the one without the other. I had spent thanksgiving being introduced to the soul; over the next few days I planned to begin to see the body.

That is to say, I intended to be a tourist.

(to be continued)