Noo Yawk

If the building we were staying at was a bar, then you could definitely call it a dive bar. It's kind of cheap and nasty, the doors were never built to close (they're actually too big for the door frames), and one neighbour got into an hour long screaming match with the super about the heating, which is, admittedly, somewhat erratic.

Steam heating is something I've never seen before, there are pipes that run into the apartment and at certain times start pumping out steam (the pipes are meant to radiate some heat too). There is no real way to predict when the heating will kick in. Sometimes you can come home to a sauna, sometimes there is no heating at all.

Still, with a fresh coat of paint and freshly polished floors, the place is actually somewhat okay. Although next to the bus station, the 7R stands for rear and so it's actually really quiet.

We're two blocks from Times Square, which is handy for when we want to stroll to the local cinemaplex (with a mighty 25 screens) and last night saw the really masterful new Kaufman movie - Synecdoche, New York (highly recomended). We're also within strolling distance of Hell's Kitchen which features lots of interesting restaurants, and the night before last we had some tasty Ethiopean dinner, which features a unique pancake bread (Injera) that you eat the curries with.

Around Times Square are The Tourists, which we can sometimes avoid being grouped with by the non stop array of people selling tours and sketches and tickets, etc. Tourists all walk about with a kind of nervous sluggishness, they are generally much heavier than the NY locals, who stay thin by a combination of walking, taking subways (in which there are no escalators that work) and by yelling at each other.

The typical NY local is stylish, but in a deliberately casual way. There is a sense of non-conformity compared to the classical European styles of Germany. One suspects however, that this non-conformity is merely an illusion as the number one activity without doubt is consumerism, either in a buying or selling capacity.

Compared to my memory of NY, people have had the wind knocked out of them by the latest financial woes, which they are all taking pretty hard. Reviews for theatre have mentions of "lovely and upbeat, particularly in these times", and people do NOT seem to have that typical upbeat attitude and instead can be overheard muttering about how much money they've lost.

Everything bad aside, New York is still a great city. If you like people, are interested in everything that people do, then NY is the place to be. There is so much richness just in the street, in the subways, as people publicly live their lives and interact and the countless wonderful strange moments that you get to witness are the things you remember. People here are not so reserved, and there is a kind of honesty in that.

Oh, and before we perpetuate the myth any further, there is indeed good coffee to be had here. We found, just down the end of our street, a perfectly boheme cafe that serves killer lattes with their funky music and cupcakes - The Cupcake Cafe. But even in a typical European/Sydney style cafe like this, they still cater to the local tastes with their self service coffee cart - serving off course lovely Americano (yeargh) style coffee...