new york glimpses: city living

Well, we're back at home and (mostly) caught up. We're also (mostly) recovered from all of the eating and drinking we packed into our week in New York. It's been slow getting this first post up, but that is largely because this trip was so different from the last time we visited the city. Though it also might have something to do with how lethargic we've been with all of that extra food in our system.

When we went last year, we stayed with my uncles in Jersey, just outside of the city. Their home was lovely and they couldn't have been more gracious hosts, but when a few of our friends recently moved into the city proper, we knew we couldn't turn down the offer to crash on their hide-a-beds. Anyone who knows us has heard how we prefer incognito tourism on vacation, so spending all of our time in the city let us indulge our penchant for "playing local."

I'm sure that our perennially-patient NY friends will roll their eyes and sigh at this one, but we really did feel like our trip was much closer to day-to-day life (if you didn't work) than our usual tourist blitz. I mean, we actually saw other people, and largely tried to keep our full meals to only 3-per-day. We even visited a lot of local grocery stores, though I guess that's pretty typical of our travel M.O.

Eschewing sightseeing in favor of everyday living made our trip unique; it was genuinely interesting to take stock of how our friends live and to transpose our lifestyle onto New York, imagining how we might adapt to life there. We spent a lot of our trip discretely looking for local iterations of the most important parts of our life (farms, markets, cooking shops), as well as seeking out the amenities we lack in Portland (first-class museums, new ethnic foods). In the process, we also noticed the absence of certain things that characterize our experience of Portland - easy bicycling, for one. Yeah, A and I both might walk faster than the average Portlander, but there is something to be said for Stumptown's quiet, unassuming pace-of-life.

Happily, our friends Catherine and Quincy offered an encouraging example of New York living. They had homemade stock in the fridge, dried beans in the pantry, and compost beneath the sink. When they looked in their fridge, they likely just saw the humor of trying to live the life they do in a cramped, walk-up, East Village apartment, but we saw simplicity.

Oddly, when we look back on our trip, our rose-colored visions of a dream life in New York all center on getting back to essentials. Ever since early this year, A and I have both had simplicity on the mind and have (ineffectively) dreamed of paring down our possessions. Now that we're back, we'll turn to one another and wistfully muse on our "simple" life in New York. "We'd only bring the essentials," we say, "who needs all of this extra closet space? Imagine how much free time we'd have to read and relax if we could just start over without all of these obligations to friends and volunteer commitments..." Ha. I can't imagine that "simplicity" ranks very highly on many people's reasons for moving to New York. This puts us squarely in the "idealistic dork" category.


Regardless of our naivete, it was still fun to act out local life for a week. Of everything we saw (and ate) in the city, there were two particular breakfasts that probably best encapsulated all of the quotidian romance of our New-York-living fantasy. For A, it was our early morning visit to Saxelby Cheese in the Essex Street Market. Purchasing a pint of Amish farmstead yogurt just might have made the entire trip for her. I could see the gleam in her eye as she imagined her daily trip to the fromager for a plougman's lunch of cheese and bread.


Now, as for myself, I was taken with the same place that entranced me last year: Russ & Daughters Appetizers. Brimming with unique foods and buzzing with old-world knowledge and class, this place epitomizes New York food to me. Whenever I walk in, I dream of incrementally working my way through their cases of smoked fish. Think of it: me, a modern-day Calvin Trillin, noshing my way down Houston Street. I could easily live on their smoked sturgeon alone.

But taken together, these reveries are all part of that soft-focus idealism that comes with travel (like the allure of Cleveland in 30 Rock). There's always that moment when you want to pack it all up and start a new life in an adopted hometown. It wouldn't be a good trip without it.

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Instead of our usual day-by-day breakdown, for the rest of our posts on our trip, we'll be writing up themed impressions of our best finds in the city. Hopefully it ends up being a little more engaging than a slide-by-slide narration of the museums we visited. Or, I should say, the foods we sampled.

Right upon our return, we came across a broadcast of KCRW's Good Food, which toured New York, visiting many of our favorite places (and giving us a few ideas for our next trip). It's a consistently great radio show, and this episode, in particular, is worth a listen.