Well THAT was a 180.
When I was younger: a teenager and a college kid, I used to hate New York. My dad would bring me up for the day to see a Broadway show, and while I loved spending time with him, Manhattan was so insane and commercial and absurd, I could barely stand it. Later on when I went to visit my friend Anna at NYU I felt that same mixture of overwhelmed and intimidated.
Things started to swing in the other direction after college. I would come to visit friends in the city and stay longer, in more out of the way places. I started to experience New York closer to how a local would- I knew it better now and it wasn’t so intimidating anymore.
In the past couple of years I’ve been up to New York dozens of times. My best friends live here, I met my fiance here. I feel comfortably here finally.
And now, after a week of cat-sitting in Brooklyn and running around the city pretending to be a local I can come clean:
I kind of really wish I lived in New York City.
Feels good to put that out there! As I mentioned in my last post, every time I visit New York I love it more and more. There’s always some new viewpoint to explore or new restaurant to try or a new site to see.
A lot of our friends now live in or near New York. Mike’s have always been there, he is a Jersey Boy after all. Many of mine have been migrating up from DC in the past couple years. Some of my best friends are now New Yorkers and I love coming to the city to catch up with them. Not to mention the plethora of travel blogger buddies who live in the city.
Additionally, New York may be the greatest city in the world for international food and culture. For a couple of foodies like us it’s paradise with it’s enormous collection of authentic restaurants: real Indian food, Cuban food, Chinese, Italian, Thai can all be easily obtained. There’s always new places to try and neighborhoods to explore. Fact is that if you have a permanent case of wanderlust like myself, you could do worse than to live in New York, where just about every culture in the world has representation if you look hard enough.
So yeah, I could live here happily- riding the subway, eating local, going out for cocktails with my girlfriends. I can totally envision that life, I think Mike could too. We were both a bit melancholy on our bus ride out of town. Both wondering when we could get back to visit the big city.
Maybe our nesting instinct is starting to kick in. We ARE getting married after all, and after 2-3 years worth of travel we’re starting to rethink the way we experience the world. It would be nice to have a real home base and an apartment of our own in the city. We got a sample of that life this week and it felt really, really nice.
This isn’t a dream I see coming true anytime soon. I’d need to make about 8 times more money then I do right now for starters. And I have other plans, big plans, that don’t involve being tied to a lease in the US just yet. But who knows, maybe someday I’ll get to call New York home.
