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“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” – Tom Wolfe<\/em><\/p>\n

I started off my year-around-the-world trip with a bang by living in the greatest city in the world. There’s nowhere quite like New York, a city so mesmerising, enthralling and dramatic\u00a0that it\u00a0cannot fail to live up to your most elaborate fantasies. It’s hard to put the past six weeks into one short blog post. New York is so busy and fast paced that I feel like I forget to breathe sometimes. It’s been a sensory, cultural and everything overload.<\/p>\n

I went a jazz age lawn party on the tree-shaded lush green lawns of Governor’s Island, a country getaway a few minutes’ ferry ride from lower Manhattan,\u00a0saw Dave Chappelle do a stand up show at Radio City Music Hall, got totally immersed in the surreal and wonderful world of Sleep No More (an adaptation of Macbeth in a multiple storey house which you wander around, exploring creepy rooms and sometimes bumping into actors who are enacting wordless\u00a0scenes), heard amazing live story telling at the Moth evenings (one of my favourite podcasts), watched\u00a0the spectacular 4th of July fireworks display near Brooklyn Bridge, drank gin, lime and celery juice and cucumber soda cocktails at Please Don’t Tell, a speakeasy bar concealed behind a telephone booth in a grungy hot dog take away restaurant and spotted the occasional celebrity (Jesse from Full House was a definite highlight), trying to be as nonchalant about it as New Yorkers are.\u00a0I spent hours and hours wandering the halls of the Met (and drank cocktails on its rooftop garden overlooking Central Park on a Friday afternoon), revisited MoMa to see my favourite paintings over and over again, learnt about the universe and Norther American mammals\u00a0at the Natural History Museum and gallery hopped in Chelsea on Thursday night’s exhibition openings but I also loved exploring the smaller museums and galleries: the delightful Frick Collection,\u00a0the Museum of Art and Design, which has some truly astounding works by contemporary designers and the Cloisters, which transported me to a medieval European monastery after just two subway rides uptown. I loved the\u00a0greenness of Central Park in the madness of the city and spent as much time in the park as I could, especially on soupy-hot afternoons: falling asleep on a field and waking up to raindrops on my face, cycling around for hours, dancing to roller disco music on a Sunday afternoon and watching a free Bonobo concert at dusk, when fireflies twinkled above our heads.<\/p>\n

I tried to get\u00a0high up in New York whenever possible: getting perspective makes you realise all over again how\u00a0mind blowingly beautiful this crazily condensed corner of the planet is. I was on top of the Empire State Building in the late afternoon as a storm rolled in like the coming of the apocalypse, and watched the sun set and the moon rise over the city from Top of the Rock, saw the sky turn purple over Manhattan from the rooftop of the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, and drank wine from the bottle on top of a Lower East Side apartment building waiting for darkness to descend on the night of the summer solstice.<\/p>\n

And then there was the food: New York has everything you could possibly want to eat and then more things you’ve never heard of. My favourites were sabich pitta sandwiches (a garlicky pocket of fried eggplant, boiled egg, hummus and tahini) from Taim, the best Mexican food I’ve ever had at half-restaurant\/half-food truck Tacombi at Fonda Nolita, Cambodian sandwiches from Num Pang in the Chelsea Market, pizza at grungy-cool Roberta’s in Bushwick and Lucali in Carroll Gardens, vegan sushi made of black rice, mango and pickled daikon from Beyond Sushi, pure comfort-food ramen from Ippudo and umami-ish ginger scallion noodles with pickled shiitake from Momofuku, pistachio and ginger ice cream from Van Leeuwen and burnt honey and salted pretzel caramel ice cream from Morgenstern’s (honestly two of the best ice cream scoops of my life), Georgia pickled peach bruschetta, earl grey tea and vodka cocktails and salted s’more pie from Beauty and Essex (a cavernous, fancy restaurant hidden behind an unassuming pawn shop in the Lower East Side), spicy vegan Asian-Italian-Mexican food from my best food truck, the Cinnamon Snail (which I would follow around the city), poached eggs with labneh and avo from Jack’s Wife Freda and chocolate babka French toast and chocolate egg cream from the newly-opened and truly delightful Russ & Daughters Cafe. Luckily there was a lot of walking in between all that eating.<\/p>\n

Being in New York for so long meant that I could go beyond being a tourist (which meant\u00a0power walking everywhere, getting annoyed by tourists who stop randomly in the middle of the road and\u00a0getting asked for directions on the subway and streets) and ticking off things on a to-do list. My favourite times in the city have been \u00a0random walks in no particular direction, strolls on quiet streets on Sunday mornings (discovering that the “city that never sleeps” is sleeping on Sunday mornings until 11am, when brunch generally starts), late night ice cream and pizza slices eaten on the steps of apartments, reading the New Yorker<\/em> to a soundtrack of someone practising the cello and someone else playing Britney Spears’ greatest hits on a piano on the grass in Washington Square Park, and just strolling\u00a0around the neighbourhood\u00a0I’ve been staying in\u00a0– the East Village – an area that sits on the fence between grungy and trendy, with dive bars and great restaurants, ramen shops and comic book stores and endless streams of people who all look like they should be photographed on Humans of New York. All the while I’ve had Sinatra’s voice on\u00a0a loop in my head.<\/p>\n

I’ve been trying to make sense of New York from the day that I got here, and then I came across this quote by EB White which puts it better than I ever could:<\/p>\n

\u201cA poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life… into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My next leg of the year-around-some-of-the-world trip is a road trip around the USA.<\/p>\n

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“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” – Tom Wolfe I started off my year-around-the-world trip with a bang by living in the greatest city in the world. There’s nowhere quite like New York, a city so mesmerising, enthralling and dramatic\u00a0that it\u00a0cannot fail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[130,131],"tags":[185,118,132,186],"yoast_head":"\n