# Posted 9:05 PM by Patrick Belton  

REFLECTIONS AFTER A WEEK IN NEW YORK: It's striking, after a period of time away from the United States, how many of the experiences and pleasures I most miss about America really turn out to be things I miss about New York. The experiences of diners, the Museum Mile, a chocolate egg cream at Katz's (which, as Voltaire would likely point out, conspicuously contain neither chocolate, nor egg, nor indeed cream); the peculiar streetscapes and atmospheres of the West Village, the Upper and Lower East Sides, the palimpsested ethnic neighborhoods of Brooklyn which are so reminscent of visigothic and frankish Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Even the combination of the legibility of the grid (or grids, adding alphabet city, Stuyvensant Town, and the West Village's - all grids which at one point or another began in the Village but didn't quite get running northwards), with the arbitrariness of the distribution across space of the mighty train lines and Soho, Chelsea, Tribeca and so forth - these together provide ample grist for the local knowledge so prized, and displayed, by everyone who has inhabited the city for more than one month. While Londoners will avoid speaking with anyone on the street unless scrupulously apologized to, and afterward convinced in quick time that their interlocutor is of precisely their social class and level of education, a New Yorker will speak with absolutely everyone whosoever on the street once convinced their interlocutor supervents the comparatively low test of not being clinically insane. Both of the two previous genetic predilections of the New Yorker in his or her native, which is to say adopted, habitat come together whenever an unsuspecting bystander happens to be caught, for want of any better reading material, in a semireligious gaze at the subway system map, which coolly places the five boroughs in their prodigiously anatomical dissection. The confluence of a native helpfulness - especially toward proslyetes - with the recent convert's desire to show off a successfully internally catechized wisdom, will result in a stream of aspirants toward you, offering each to interpret for you the mysteries of the subway system, without so much as a potato knish in payment.

I'm now en route to Alaska, via first Newark, then Minneapolis (which affords a panoply of rich opportunities to the traveller, to include coffee, shaving, and bathroom facilities), and afterwards onward to Anchorage and then Fairbanks. Will I be taking a blogging break from the Arctic Circle, you ask? Fuhggedaboudit. I'll be seeing you all from there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion