In Defense of NYC

Oh man... you know you've lived in a former British colony too long when you have to google whether Americans spell it "defense" or "defence"...

Just read an entertaining article on the hate/love relationship of NYC.  And I'm sorry, I know things like summer humidity, the "never-ending" noise, and crowds are genuine gripes with the city.  And I also know I need to stop my "this is nothing compared to India" pretty darn soon if I still want friends to hang out with me.

BUT... since part of the reason I'm continuing this blog is to capture my transition back to life as I knew it, I just can't resist.  Part of me wants to write a response to the article substituting Delhi for NYC... where the heat slaps you like a skyscraper and I surely did lose some of my hearing (which I'm praying will come back).

Although I do have to agree with her about the snow...

The thing is, her "love" bit about NYC rung so true that I found myself with a huge smile on my face by the time I finished the article.

One thing's for sure: it's nice to be home. (well, when I'll be home next week, but this counts too.)

Blog below:

I hate New York. I really do.

I hate that when you walk outside on a summer day, the humidity slaps you like a ton of bricks. You can’t walk on the sidewalk without accumulating massive droplets of nasty air conditioner water in your hair and the entire city reeks like a cesspool. Like, an actual cesspool because people do their business in the middle of the street on a regular basis. And no one even thinks twice about it.

I hate that being outside of your building means being constantly touched by strangers. They rub up against you as you’re entering the subway, brush your shoulder as they try to get in front of you in the crosswalk, kick you in the shins like you need the extra bruises. Getting flat-tired is a daily occurrence. It’s like the construction zone on the highway that never gets finished, except this one has sweat and germs and halitosis instead of air conditioning and Katy Perry on the radio and personal space.

I hate that I’m slowly but surely going completely deaf because everything is so goddamn loud all the time. Even when you’re sleeping, it’s loud. The lingering ringing of my iPod, which is turned up to the maximum volume so I can drown out the bustling cars, trains, and cell phone conversations, never really stops. It just carries over into the next day when the cycle repeats itself.

I hate that 30 minutes after the snow falls, it turns brown with dirt and cooties. And then it takes 5 freaking months to finally melt.

I hate that you can’t get a decent meal for under $10 no matter how hard you try. Come to think of it, you can’t even get a shitty meal for under $10. That day-old salad bar says it’s $7.99, but with the gajillion percent tax rate plus a bottle of water you’re up to $12.25 already.

I hate that if you decide you want to get any kind of fresh air, you have to go to Central Park where everyone else and their dog and kid are polluting the environment with their cigarettes and poop. And believe you me, this is not the rainbow poop.

I hate that you have to have money to not be miserable.

I hate that everyone is trying to be something all the time. Whether it’s bringing back the feather earrings and fanny packs or trying to save world with raw vegan gluten-free sugar-free fat-free whateverthehell cookies, it’s always something. Everyone is in the race to come up with the next big thing, and the competition is insufferable. It’s not “what do you like?” or “what are your interests?” or even “why do I want to know you?” It’s always “what do you do?” and “who do you know?” and “how can I take advantage of that?” Sigh.

Of course, I love New York. I really do.

I love that when you walk outside on a summer day, there are a thousand and one free concerts, beer gardens, fresh oysters, outdoor patios, mimosas, and wild bartenders. I love that it doesn’t matter if you’re dripping sweat from your 45-minute commute and need to change your shirt when you get to the office because everyone else is doing the same thing, too.

I love that being outside of your building means you have the opportunity to meet someone amazing, someone unlike anyone you’ve never met before. Someone who could change your entire perception of the world during the course of a subway ride. I love that even when you’re in the worst mood ever from exhaustion or stress and the last thing you want to do is talk to anyone ever, there’s always some guy there to whistle at you and tell you that you look beautiful today and can you walk by him again so he can get another look at that smile?

I love that city really doesn’t ever sleep, and if you need to work late, party late, eat late (or early, for that matter), you’ll always find others who are out and about, frolicking around under the bright lights and steady hum of the streets.

I love that even the crazy ones are embraced with open arms, because really, we’ve all been there at one point or another.

I love that you can get any type of cuisine in almost any neighborhood at any time, day or night. Many of the chefs in New York have traveled far and wide to master their art, and they refuse to serve anything less than exquisite. And these chefs aren’t always cooking in the fancy 5-star restaurants, they’re serving up the best hot dog you ever had in a hole in the wall in Brooklyn. There are flavors and presentations and combinations of herbs and spices that I never could have imagined, and sometimes they find a way to be perfectly paired with a nice cold can of PBR.

I love how incredibly peaceful the first snowfall is. The time when everyone stays in their apartment, drinking hot chocolate, playing card games, and pretending to be kids again so as not to disrupt the sheets of white on their front steps and windowsills.

I love when the sun starts to set, the light refracts through the clouds and casts beautiful shimmering lines on the skyscrapers and water towers and sidewalks. I love that you can stand on a roof in midtown and see two different bodies of water simply by looking right and left.

I love that everyone who lives in New York is here because they truly want to be here. They are working on building their empire, whatever it is, and the passion, creativity, and devotion to their cause is tangible. I love that there is a sense of community, even among strangers, who when they see you struggling to get on and off the train or up the subway stairs or into the elevator because you’ve been traveling back and forth to your boyfriend’s tiny apartment with way too much shit, they’ll offer a kind hand.

I love that if you need a drink at 11am on a Monday, you’re never alone.

And so here I am. Back in a city I never thought I’d live in again. And I love it.

Jakarta

Ah, chillin' in a hotel lobby at 10pm with my computer... I feel like a true consultant once again, especially with the ubiquitous piano lounge music that I always found a bit bittersweet when traveling for work.  But this is Jakarta, where the number of karaoke bars rivals that of the Philippines, and an innocuous hotel piano turns into a spontaneous karaoke party with some Whitney Houston.

It's all a bit silly, but hey, a gal's gotta work.  Instead of paying a ridiculous amount of money for internet in my room, I go downstairs to the bar and ask for the (free) internet code.  The waitress asks what I want to drink and I say "water".  This, apparently, is not allowed in the bar.  So she hands me a coupon for a free drink, along with my coupon for free internet.  I smile and nicely return the coupon, saying I'm only going to be here for five minutes to send out an email.  She leaves, only to return with a glass of champagne, saying it's a "welcome drink."  If this is not peer pressure, I'm not sure what is... and hey, who can turn down a glass of champagne?  Half an hour later, it seems as good a time as any to blog...

They say you never fully appreciate where you are until you've gone.  What's been fascinating over the last few weeks since we've left India is seeing Indian influences across the region (well, okay, Burma and Indonesia).  With modern pundits constantly debating about the amount of Indian influence in current foreign affairs, it's easy to forget just how influential India has been in history.  We saw this everywhere in Burma, from the Burmese alphabet to the Buddhist temples with Brahman influences, and I'm now seeing this in Indonesia as well.

The Indonesian currency is the "rupiah" (which, at $1 approximating Rp 10,000 is weirdly difficult to navigate, as I have two versions (an old and new) each of Rp 100,000; 10,000; and 1,000 currency in my wallet, making everyday transactions take much longer than they should).  The majority of our meetings here have been conducted in Bahasa (with only a few actually having translations), but it's funny picking up some Hindi, as Bahasa was heavily influenced by Sanskrit.  

As I've come to learn, Bahasa is actually quite a fascinating language.  A trading language, it's picked up Sanskrit, Tagalog, and others along the trade routes, with some Dutch thrown in (though architectural remnants of the former colonizer seem few and far between, even in Jakarta).  I was in Yogyakarta (in Java) earlier this week for meetings, and an hour away lies one of Asia's holiest Buddhist temples (Borobudur, the 7th wonder of the world!), strongly influenced by India, with an immense Hindu temple nearby.

Of course, this makes it sound like Indonesia lacks originality in its culture, which of course is the furthest from the truth.  An archipelago of over 17,000 islands (more than the Philippines!), Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country, with 86% of its 238 million people practicing Islam.  Our meetings began with a prayer to Allah (similar to meetings in the Philippines starting with a prayer to the father), only this time a gong followed.

Compared to another Muslim country like Bangladesh, it's quite easy to get alcohol here, although a bottle of wine will cost you about $40! (Beer is much cheaper, at about $2 a can at your local convenience store).  Cigarettes are ubiquitous, with one health delegate saying it is the most heavily consumed good across Indonesia, after rice (in fact, until the country recently began growing it themselves, cloves to Indonesia for smoking were Madagascar's largest export!)  Contrary to what you might think I may be doing here based on these newly-acquired facts, I'm actually inside conference rooms all day and this is the stuff that gets talked about at breaks...

And on that note, I think it's time for bed!  Off to brave the Jakarta traffic tomorrow morning...

Home Sweet Home

After a grueling 38 hour trip from Yangon, Tyler and I officially moved back to New York last week!  Jay-Z has become our official soundtrack (though let's be honest, it basically has been all year), and the big lights certainly are inspiring me.

Who knew, though, that the most pronounced reverse culture shock would come from, not India (where we were for almost five years), but Burma - where we spent two weeks that felt like an eternity, in the best way possible.

Three stories:

#1: A few hours after our flight, we headed straight to the mall (a suburban couple already!) to get our cell phones in order.  As the service rep reached out hastily for our pristine hundred dollar bill, we both cringed automatically -- needing to stop ourselves from urging him to BE CAREFUL WITH THAT!

In Burma (or Myanmar, as everyone local calls it), exchanging US dollars for kyat (pronounced very confusingly as "jet") only became legal one month ago.  Prior to that, all currency exchange was done on the black market, and this market continues to flourish despite banks also getting involved.  Somewhere someone up the chain decided that they should only touch dollars if they are recent, pristine one hundred dollar bills -- meaning absolutely no folds, marks, areas of fading, etc etc etc.

To be fair, we were warned about this, and I asked Citibank Long Island for the nicest bills they had.  Despite this, some still got rejected, and we found ourselves closely protecting the bills we had from any accidental fold or marking.  A good exchange rate was $1 to 800 kyat, and when we conducted our first exchange, we received 80 bills of 1000 kyat, which felt just a bit ridiculous in either of our overflowing wallets.

The recent history of currency, like everything in Burma, is fascinating.  General Ne Win, who founded the Burma Socialist Programme Party (the only political party until 1988) and served as chairman from 1962 to 1988, apparently only likes the number 9, which he considers auspicious.  He therefore banned all currency in denominations not divisible by 9, literally wiping out the savings of millions of Burmese (we bought one of these unusable bills as a fundraiser for political prisoners at the incredible Moustache Brothers' comedy show; see NYT article here).  Incredible.

#2: This leads directly to culture shock #2.  Later our first week back in NY, we were chatting with Tyler's parents about Burma.  They asked about the junta situation, and I felt myself go into a whisper when talking to them about it (though we were all in the US).

And that's the thing with Burma.  For all the incredible, exciting changes spurring democracy forward, it's still a military junta.  Emails are read, intercepted, and blocked (learning about how the democracy movement is organizing their movement across in Burma is the stuff of movies).  There are spies keeping tabs wherever you are.  We had drinks with a friend of a friend in Yangon - a former banker who moved to Burma initially to scope out business investment, and now staying to be part of the democratic movement.  When Tyler mentioned a general's name just a bit too loudly, he instinctively looked around and urged us to keep our voices down.

But the changes are there.  You see it economically in things like the new pipeline being built by China from the Bay of Bengal to China's Yunnan province.  And you see it in images across the country (well, at least the 10% that tourists are allowed to visit).  As recently as a couple years ago, images of Aung San Suu Kyi were banned, and it was forbidden to even utter her name (even now, everyone still calls her "the lady").

Now, there are images of her everywhere.  My favorite was at a small textile workshop, where each woman had a photo of "the lady" at her workstation.  Many of these were photos of Aung San Suu Kyi and Hillary Clinton, from her trip to Burma earlier this year.

#3: It's easy to take for granted that Burmese people can even access current news and images such as these of Aung San Suu Kyi and Hillary Clinton.  During our stay at Inle Lake, we grew to become friends with our tour guide, Nyi Nyi, who took us not only to a school and orphanage that he's involved with, but his home as well.  In the course of our conversations, it came up that he loves reading National Geographic, but print versions of this are essentially impossible to get.

Now this hits home - especially being back in New York City, where absolutely everything is at our fingertips, 24/7.  Nyi Nyi warned us that any packages sent to him with National Geographic would likely get intercepted.  So when we saw some copies for sale in Yangon, we excitedly went to buy some... until we saw they were from 2003!

In the whirlwind since we've been home, I'm only now really digesting our trip to Burma.  I've never felt farther away from the US as in Burma, where globally ubiquitous products like Coke are only sold on the black market, and entire generations continue to grow up never seeing an image of Mickey Mouse.  Just about no one is on their cell phones, as sim cards cost about $150 (compared to about $1 in India), adding to the perception of incredible distance.

Needless to say, it was an incredible, unique, eye-opening, inspiring trip.  Pictures to come...