It’s been nearly 2 months since I finished travelling, so it’s about time that I got round to finish writing about it. So much for my thinking I’d be writing on the road. Well I did, but then life got in the way like it has a bad habit of doing.
New York City was the last stop on my journey before returning to Europe and hitting the grim reality of London town. In a way New York was the perfect continuation to the fun, excitement and surprises I had in Montreal. And alongside the Canadian city, New York was also the one place in North America that really grabbed me as a city, visually and culturally - though as opposed to Montreal I was expecting that before getting there and it delivered on many levels above and beyond my expectations. This is all hardly surprising though, considering it’s New York and well, it’s New York. A city that still held incredible appeal even though I already ‘knew’ it from watching countless movies and TV series and listening to an unhealthy (if there is such a thing) amount of music.
At the same time, as much as I was looking forward to New York and I enjoyed it, I have to admit Montreal still remains as the highlight of the North American leg of my trip. I loved New York, and would go back in a heartbeat but for entirely different reasons, and I don’t think I could live there whereas Montreal is definitely a much more appealing city all things considered and one I could see myself move to for an undefined period of time.
Anyways, I left Montreal for New York with Lewis and Ben way too early on a Saturday morning in August - especially considering Lewis and I had basically had no sleep and we were just about to embark on an 11h train journey (cheap travel for the win baby). The train journey proved a bit of a challenge, not so much for the lack of sleep than for the insane bullshit at the border crossing, where we were delayed by a good few hours while border control played a game of catch the potential terrorist or whatever the hell it was. Lewis got ‘interviewed’ because his British passport stated he was born in Dublin, which made me laugh quite a lot considering my Italian passport states I am born in France but I guess those countries don’t quite register on the radar of ‘dangerous’ for U.S. border control. Must be the whole freedom hating thing. It’s got to be said that border control was by far the worse, with overly serious officers looking for any excuse to break balls and delay things. All was pretty soon forgotten with copious amounts of alcohol (mainly for Lewis as Ben was dozed up on sleeping pills and I was just lacking sleep) and a game of ‘pass the controller to fly the portable helicopter inside a carriage train.’
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written by Laurent
\\ tags: America, architecture, art, Brooklyn, culture, food, gentrification, hip hop, Manhattan, neighbourhoods, New York, summer, travelling, writing
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