Tag Archives: new york

Big City

Growing up, I always heard people say they did not want to raise their children in the city. Like city kids were wild animals left loose. I grew up in the city, and I think I turned out okay! There is so much ingrained in me as a result of being a city kid.
Brooklyn is as close to suburban as I ever want to live. It is a borough of New York City, but mostly residential. Even as New York feared its Manhattanization, it is still nothing like Manhattan. Sometimes I like to spend an entire day in Brooklyn, and never get on a train. I love days like that, though they are few and far between these days…
I have sick wanderlust, mostly I seek other big cities by water. Even when I am in another big city, sometimes it seems dwarfed to me because I am so used to New York. I feel like this is it? It is not a cliché if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. Nothing has ever been like New York to me, as big and overwhelming…
But I love to leave it, don’t forget that. And not every return is so home sweet home feeling either. Traveling made me discover there is so much out there, and as great as New York is it cannot embody everything. I remember recently having a horchata latte, something I have never seen in New York.
Often I walk the streets of New York in race-like fashion, and wonder why I cannot stop it when I am elsewhere. I am
always the fastest person unless I make a conscious effort not to be. In New York, I have to move.
But New York is the place I feel the safest, I know so many of its nooks and crannies. New York is the gritty place I went to high school, and rode the subway to places I had never been just to see what they looked like. Where parts of Manhattan feel as familiar to me as Brooklyn, and yet I am surprised almost every day by some person or place. Tall buildings contain me. Sometimes all I think of is the next place I am going to go, or try to learn another language or explore a new cuisine. I take refuge in museums, taking in their immeasurable beauty. Or sit in the lobby of a hotel to write during lunch–my writer’s space.
New York is a giant examination of contradictions, but ultimately home. Living here makes me philosophical and dreamy. Once I only wanted to live here, now I see other places maybe I could live in. But New York is written on me, and indelible.

photo by f dot leonora

Paris

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New York is the perfect city to live in if you are going to travel the world, it is incomparable to any place else that I have been. I feel proud and happy when it is my destination after a trip somewhere. My love for New York was completely full and undivided…

…until I went to Paris.

I wanted to go to Paris since I was a little girl, doesn’t everyone? I wanted to go, was always planning for the potential trip and finally I went last year after Eroticon 2013. London was another desired destination, but there was no way I was going to be that close to Paris and not go! After the conference, I hurried to bed for an early train to take me to Paris. In my taxi from Gare Nord, with my charming driver who knew very little English, my eyes were so wide. I kept expecting to hear accordions in the background (when I did on a train I would have tipped the accordionist if I had change).

I was afraid to go to Paris in a way, because I was so in love with it already I was afraid the reality could not live up to that sentiment. The first thing I discovered was that it is a real city, not a museum. People live there, and I tried to be very respectful of that even though I was gawking at everything I saw. Paris is smaller than New York City. As weird as it sounds as a native New Yorker, I hate crowds. I cannot imagine living in a very small town, but sometimes New York is overwhelming. Paris meanwhile is not empty, but you can walk down a street by yourself and hear yourself as well.

On every corner there was a cafe, restaurant, chocolate store or art museum. The things I live for…Sadly there are a lot of bookstores too, but my French is very light. I know how to say perfunctory things, but cannot elaborate the way I do well…here!

I stayed at the same hotel for two separate trips to Paris, and I am planning to stay there for the third trip as well. I love the arrondissement where I have stayed, which is bad-mouthed in all of the guidebooks and good! I want it to stay that way. I have barely eaten outside of the neighborhood, and the last time made friends with the bartenders who served me free snacks. There is a cheese store across the street from the hotel, and I still dream of the cheese I bought there…

Paris is for me a lovely place to exist and be hidden at the same time. As a visitor who is not fluent in the language, I am not an active part of the scene so I can be a voyeur. I enjoy it intensely because Paris is beautiful. On my second trip, I started to see how I could walk from place to place instead of taking the Metro. I started to feel like I was getting the hang of things.

Of course, the erotica editor and writer in me had to go to the Musee de l’Erotisme. I went to Pigalle on a rainy Saturday, down the block from the museum is the Moulin Rouge–with Starbucks across the street! You are not allowed to take pictures there, but my best memory was on the third floor I think, with a wall that told the history of prostitution in Paris. I walked that whole floor so intrigued, reading everything that was written.

Someone asked me why was I going to Paris again, and I answered because it is Paris! I was incredulous that a person could ask such a thing. The only thing about Paris that is a challenge for me is the language barrier, but someday it will not be a barrier either. I am a communicator, I cannot let it be a barrier…