In 2006 I went overseas by myself for the first time. I chose Vietnam for no other reason than my friend Sam had been there a couple of times and I thought he was cute. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival in Ho Chi Minh City I was in the back seat of a cab with no seatbelts whizzing through night-time streets slightly wider than queen-sized bed, while surrounded on all sides by hundreds of locals on Vespas, all beeping like a flock of deranged road-runners. Within an hour I was ensconced in my hotel room drinking Vietnamese beer (which looks like VB and tastes like awesome), lying on my Vietnamese bed (which was twice the size of any bed I'd ever seen in my entire life), watching Vietnamese television (which, on the bizarre-o-meter lies somewhere between Mexican Soap Opera and Japanese Game Shows) while bright orange Vietnamese geckos ran across my ceiling going 'gnak! gnak!' at each other (which was cool).
The point is that from my first night in Vietnam I knew that I was a total outsider. I had no idea of cultural norms, I didn't speak any Vietnamese, and so I could cheerfully bumble my way about the country for two weeks while the locals good-naturedly tolerated things like amusing mispronunciations of "thank you" or gross violations of holy buildings. I was a tourist, I was an idiot, and that was fine.
Living in America as an Australian is a little more tricky. As we all know, American culture leaves its Yankee fingerprints all over our dinky-di media industry (except of course for the ABC, which the British have claimed as their own). A lifetime's exposure to everything from "Seinfeld" to "Sesame Street" has lulled me into a false sense of familiarity with America, and the fact that everyone here speaks English only aids my delusion that the US and Australia are essentially the same place, just that they're on different sides of the world and one has far superior coffee (hint: it's not the US). In reality, there are a whole host of subtle yet bewildering social norms here that I grapple with on a daily basis.
The most obvious of these is tipping. EVERYONE knows that in the US, you tip in restaurants and bars (although on my first night ever in the US, way back in 2007, I forgot to tip the waitress. I still feel guilty about that). What no one told me is that there's a whole HOST of other people you have to tip. Catch a cab, and you have to tip the taxi driver. Get a haircut, and you have to tip not only the hairdresser, but also the person who washes your hair. Most recently, I paid eighty bucks for a fairly ho-hum massage, and on my way out the door the receptionist asked me, "and how much tip will you be leaving today?"
"Tip?" I asked, a little incredulously. "You tip masseurs here, too?"
"Yeah. Usually fifteen to twenty per cent," came the reply with smiles.
"Well, what did I just pay eighty bucks for?"
"Yeah, the minimum wage is pretty low here," was the explanation. I left a fifteen dollar tip, but I can't help but feel pissed off about some capitalistic yoga master sitting somewhere in Williamsburg on a pile of eighty-dollar massage money, while his poor little massage-minions wait hopefully for tips huddling for warmth around burning barrels in the street wearing Thai fisherman pants and Crocs.
The thing that is most bewildering about tipping though is that it seems completely arbitrary who you do and don't tip. If you go to a cafe and order a coffee and you collect it at the counter, you don't tip the person who made you the coffee. But if you order a coffee in a cafe and a waiter brings it to you, you tip the waiter. Surely you should tip the person who makes you the coffee? Doesn't that require some level of skill, more so than merely bringing a coffee to your table, which simply requires functioning arms and legs?
At first I thought I had it sorted out - you tip someone who actually physically does something for you. But then on closer scrutiny this doesn't hold out - you tip cab drivers, but not subway drivers. You tip waiters but not the garbage man. You tip the girl who pours your beers all night, but not the girl who later splints your leg after you fall down a flight of stairs, drunk as a skunk from aforementioned beers. I would say each of these services are just as important as the others, but only some of them are deemed worthy of a tip.
It's heavy. Being the caring individual that I am, I feel as though I'm exploiting the poor people who rely on tips to make a living. If they were simply earning enough from their wage to put food on the table or a roof over their head then I wouldn't give a shit. But to know that I personally have it within my power to either make their night or starve them to death is a responsibility I'm uncomfortable with. I almost feel as though I need to carry around a basket filled with one-dollar bills and skip down the street hurling handfuls of cash at anyone who so much as steps out of my way on the footpath.
The upshot to this is that the service industry here is a genuine service industry. Sure, it might be mercenary, but the promise of a crisp dollar bill is all it can take to encourage the waitress to smile and pleasantly offer you more beer rather than scowling, snatching away your pasta primavera before you've finished with it, and then arguing with you for five minutes as to what constitutes a "finished meal" (which happened to me once in Australia. Bitch). A tip is leverage to ensure that the service you are paying for is actually done properly and politely.
Damn, I wish I hadn't tipped the cab driver on the day I arrived. Stupid me.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Uncle Sam don't want no whingers
"The problem with Australia," my friend Jeremy says, "is that your government mothers you." It's May of 2008, and Jeremy and I are in a bar in Sydney. Jeremy is a young American composer* who I met by pure coincidence in Canberra a few weeks earlier. He was about to return to New York after living in Sydney for twelve months, and after a couple of farewell beers we moved onto a conversation topic that always crops up when one party is foreign: What Your Country Does Wrong.
"What the hell do you mean?" I ask, mildly offended. Sure, we have public healthcare but that hardly qualifies us as mothered. God, in some Scandinavian countries the citizens cheerfully fork over half their income so the authorities can do things like buy thousands of bright yellow bicycles for public use (that are then all easily stolen by less-civic minded community members. Apparently the government in question had not considered that light-fingered cyclists might stoop to painting the bikes a less conspicuous colour).
"I mean, your government mollycoddles you to the point where everything is safe. There's always a safety net. Here in Sydney the job I've been working pays me twice as much as what I would earn doing it in New York because the minimum wage is so high. I have superannuation and cheap health insurance. In short, it's not that hard for me to keep my head above water."
"But surely that's a good thing?" I say. I couldn't think Jeremy was more backward than if he'd said, "you know what the problem with Australia is? You have way too much oxygen here."
"Look," he says, "if you're asking me if I would rather live in a society like Australia where I could feel happy and safe and not have to worry about whether I'll get sick or get a job all the time, then, probably yeah. But Australia sacrifices something for that. No one needs to take risks."
It was at this point that I kind of stopped taking the conversation seriously since I had decided that Jeremy felt the need to live his life according to strict sado-masochistic principles of struggle and angst, and it was pointless me trying to convince him otherwise. But something of that conversation always stuck with me, and two years later, living in New York, I think I'm beginning to understand a little of what he was getting at.
My neighbourhood is not exactly ritzy. It's safe, for sure, but it's a little grungy and maybe a little poor, kind of like a cross the Sydney suburbs of Newtown and Cabramatta, if the former had hipsters instead of emos, and the latter was home to several generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. It's noisy, busy and thoroughly lived-in. It also seems to be home to an inordinate amount of a limited variety of businesses. Walk down the street and in one block you might pass a grocery store, a laundromat, a liquor store (no bottle-o's here!), a cafe, and a hardware store, and in the next block you'll pass exactly the same kinds of stores mere metres from their competitors. The same can be said for most parts of New York - I guess the sheer volume of people keeps all these grocery stores and laundromats in business.
The stores are pretty basic. They're not bedazzled with lovely faux-mahogany shopfittings and soft downlighting, they're big white rooms with fluorescent lights and a bunch of stuff on metal racks. In short, the people who own these businesses are poor, perhaps with limited education who can't speak proper English as good as I or youse, and the choice is to either open another laundromat or starve. There's no welfare safety net to live off while they look for a job or go to publicly-funded TAFE (well there is, but it's so woefully pitiful that one can't help but wonder if it's a cruel joke).
But what is really striking about these businesses is that they seem to occupy a fuzzy middle ground between "business" and "lounge room". Anyone who has been to South-East Asia will know exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. They may be poor business owner struggling to make ends meet, but man, are they proud of their business. The shopfronts are just as likely to be decorated with pictures of the owners' kids as the actual stock inside the shop. They keep not just the shop spotless, but regularly scrub down the pavement outside the store. And they're social hubs - the owners sit outside on plastic chairs and talk shit with their friends or family waiting for customers to come, and when they do they stand obligingly behind the cash register until the customer either buys something or doesn't, whereupon they return to the plastic chairs outside in the street. The nights are still quite warm, so in the evening when I come home from a hard day'sdrinking at the pub study it's pretty common to see two dozen people congregating outside the grocery store on the corner having a barbeque in the street, kids running around, music playing loudly, old men arguing about whatever crap it is old men argue about, with only the occasional customer wanting to buy milk to spoil the illusion.
I think I'm painting a pretty rosey picture here though. Obviously there's a flipside to this salubrious business model. In Australia business owners can reasonably aspire to the luxury of not actually needing to be in their shop seven days a week from dawn til dusk. If they work hard then one day they'll be able to afford to staff their shop with disinterested teenagers with a faceful of piercings (I'm over thirty, I can say that kind of shit now). Here, the economy isn't as strong as the US government likes to pretend it is (or liked to pretend - I don't think anyone has any illusions as to the state of the US economy any more), and so it's pretty unlikely that anyone around here will ever earn enough from their business that they can afford to support themselves and a staff member. So the buck stops with them.
I reckon it's this kind of environment that has made America what it is today - a nation of self-made men (and of course women too, no sexist connotations, 'self-made men' has a nice alliterative ring to it, that's all. Shut-up, this is my blog). You grow up in an environment with no safety net. Mum and dad have worked hard all their lives to support you and your siblings, and they do it tough. Perhaps out of a desire to make them proud, but probably out of a desire to not have to work every day for the rest of your life, you think 'screw this' and you scrimp and save and work like a dog so you can afford to go to college to get a degree to get a decent job. And the government didn't do shit to help you. You did it all on your own. You can do anything.
So America takes risks. Americans love it when people rise from the gutter and become successful artists or media personalities or politicians or just plain old rich-as-hell. These people are beacons of hope to everyone else who aspires to one day 'make it big'. "If they can, then I can, because it's completely up to me - God knows the government isn't going to help me". Unlike Australia, there's no "tall poppy syndrome" here, because no one can afford to rest on their laurels and shyly suggest that perhaps one day they might like to be slightly famous. If you don't do it, then someone else will, and no one will give a shit that you're still selling drill-bits and curtain rods in the same store for fifty years.
Having read back on all this, it could be misconstrued that I've become one of those Aussie ex-pats that, having left Australia, pontificates from their soapbox safely located on the other side of the world about how they were never appreciated Downunder and that one day everyone will be like "ooooh, why did we not realise what a talent we had? Oh boo hoo hoo, poor stupid us... boo hoo...". I'm not (well maybe a little. But mostly not). I love Australia and all the opportunities it has given me, and one day I want to return and give back what I'm learning over here. Nor would I ever advocate the abolition of welfare or public education or anything like that in Australia. I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps there's a reason why New York is a cultural mecca and Sydney just likes to think it is - adversity makes you strong.
*FYI not all my American friends are composers. I'm not a complete music nerd.
"What the hell do you mean?" I ask, mildly offended. Sure, we have public healthcare but that hardly qualifies us as mothered. God, in some Scandinavian countries the citizens cheerfully fork over half their income so the authorities can do things like buy thousands of bright yellow bicycles for public use (that are then all easily stolen by less-civic minded community members. Apparently the government in question had not considered that light-fingered cyclists might stoop to painting the bikes a less conspicuous colour).
"I mean, your government mollycoddles you to the point where everything is safe. There's always a safety net. Here in Sydney the job I've been working pays me twice as much as what I would earn doing it in New York because the minimum wage is so high. I have superannuation and cheap health insurance. In short, it's not that hard for me to keep my head above water."
"But surely that's a good thing?" I say. I couldn't think Jeremy was more backward than if he'd said, "you know what the problem with Australia is? You have way too much oxygen here."
"Look," he says, "if you're asking me if I would rather live in a society like Australia where I could feel happy and safe and not have to worry about whether I'll get sick or get a job all the time, then, probably yeah. But Australia sacrifices something for that. No one needs to take risks."
It was at this point that I kind of stopped taking the conversation seriously since I had decided that Jeremy felt the need to live his life according to strict sado-masochistic principles of struggle and angst, and it was pointless me trying to convince him otherwise. But something of that conversation always stuck with me, and two years later, living in New York, I think I'm beginning to understand a little of what he was getting at.
My neighbourhood is not exactly ritzy. It's safe, for sure, but it's a little grungy and maybe a little poor, kind of like a cross the Sydney suburbs of Newtown and Cabramatta, if the former had hipsters instead of emos, and the latter was home to several generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. It's noisy, busy and thoroughly lived-in. It also seems to be home to an inordinate amount of a limited variety of businesses. Walk down the street and in one block you might pass a grocery store, a laundromat, a liquor store (no bottle-o's here!), a cafe, and a hardware store, and in the next block you'll pass exactly the same kinds of stores mere metres from their competitors. The same can be said for most parts of New York - I guess the sheer volume of people keeps all these grocery stores and laundromats in business.
The stores are pretty basic. They're not bedazzled with lovely faux-mahogany shopfittings and soft downlighting, they're big white rooms with fluorescent lights and a bunch of stuff on metal racks. In short, the people who own these businesses are poor, perhaps with limited education who can't speak proper English as good as I or youse, and the choice is to either open another laundromat or starve. There's no welfare safety net to live off while they look for a job or go to publicly-funded TAFE (well there is, but it's so woefully pitiful that one can't help but wonder if it's a cruel joke).
But what is really striking about these businesses is that they seem to occupy a fuzzy middle ground between "business" and "lounge room". Anyone who has been to South-East Asia will know exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. They may be poor business owner struggling to make ends meet, but man, are they proud of their business. The shopfronts are just as likely to be decorated with pictures of the owners' kids as the actual stock inside the shop. They keep not just the shop spotless, but regularly scrub down the pavement outside the store. And they're social hubs - the owners sit outside on plastic chairs and talk shit with their friends or family waiting for customers to come, and when they do they stand obligingly behind the cash register until the customer either buys something or doesn't, whereupon they return to the plastic chairs outside in the street. The nights are still quite warm, so in the evening when I come home from a hard day's
I think I'm painting a pretty rosey picture here though. Obviously there's a flipside to this salubrious business model. In Australia business owners can reasonably aspire to the luxury of not actually needing to be in their shop seven days a week from dawn til dusk. If they work hard then one day they'll be able to afford to staff their shop with disinterested teenagers with a faceful of piercings (I'm over thirty, I can say that kind of shit now). Here, the economy isn't as strong as the US government likes to pretend it is (or liked to pretend - I don't think anyone has any illusions as to the state of the US economy any more), and so it's pretty unlikely that anyone around here will ever earn enough from their business that they can afford to support themselves and a staff member. So the buck stops with them.
I reckon it's this kind of environment that has made America what it is today - a nation of self-made men (and of course women too, no sexist connotations, 'self-made men' has a nice alliterative ring to it, that's all. Shut-up, this is my blog). You grow up in an environment with no safety net. Mum and dad have worked hard all their lives to support you and your siblings, and they do it tough. Perhaps out of a desire to make them proud, but probably out of a desire to not have to work every day for the rest of your life, you think 'screw this' and you scrimp and save and work like a dog so you can afford to go to college to get a degree to get a decent job. And the government didn't do shit to help you. You did it all on your own. You can do anything.
So America takes risks. Americans love it when people rise from the gutter and become successful artists or media personalities or politicians or just plain old rich-as-hell. These people are beacons of hope to everyone else who aspires to one day 'make it big'. "If they can, then I can, because it's completely up to me - God knows the government isn't going to help me". Unlike Australia, there's no "tall poppy syndrome" here, because no one can afford to rest on their laurels and shyly suggest that perhaps one day they might like to be slightly famous. If you don't do it, then someone else will, and no one will give a shit that you're still selling drill-bits and curtain rods in the same store for fifty years.
Having read back on all this, it could be misconstrued that I've become one of those Aussie ex-pats that, having left Australia, pontificates from their soapbox safely located on the other side of the world about how they were never appreciated Downunder and that one day everyone will be like "ooooh, why did we not realise what a talent we had? Oh boo hoo hoo, poor stupid us... boo hoo...". I'm not (well maybe a little. But mostly not). I love Australia and all the opportunities it has given me, and one day I want to return and give back what I'm learning over here. Nor would I ever advocate the abolition of welfare or public education or anything like that in Australia. I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps there's a reason why New York is a cultural mecca and Sydney just likes to think it is - adversity makes you strong.
*FYI not all my American friends are composers. I'm not a complete music nerd.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Number Crunching
Let's be frank - Orange is not, in the scheme of things, a thriving metropolis. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't need to be, and despite my promise to myself when I was 19 and first left my hometown that I would NEVER return, I've found over the last few years I've started to get pangs of nostalgia for the peace and quiet of Orange. I wonder sometimes, if I feel a bit crazy about all this, how must Ellie feel? Ellie is 18, from Orange as well, and this year also moved to New York to study dance at Julliard, one of the US' most prestigious arts schools. She's pretty much finished school, moved from Orange to New York without the benefit of the buffer period I've enjoyed of moving to gradually larger cities (aside from a couple of years she spent at school in Sydney. Wish I'd done that, darn it). When I first met Ellie in Orange a few months ago however she seemed composed, more together than I was when I was 18, and completely serene about the fact that she was about to move to what is one of the great cultural centres of the world from (again, let's be perfectly frank) what is... um... not one of the great cultural centres of the world.
Lucky her. I was always worried about how I'd cope with the hustle and bustle of the big city because I'm a country boy at heart. So when Daniel invited me to visit him in little New Haven last weekend, I happily accepted.
He seems to be settling in alright (at the very least there's been no more vitriolic encounters with cab drivers or the police. Yet). After a couple of weeks in New York, it was kind of strange to be in a little country town again. New Haven is kind of like Orange - it's fresh and open with lots of great food and beautiful houses, but at night it can be a pretty dodgy and there's certain neighbourhoods you don't walk alone in unless you have a bunch of pesky money taking up valuable space in your wallet and you need some thoughtful mugger to take it off your hands.
When it came time to head back home I jumped on the train and choo-chooed my way two hours south back to Grand Central Station. As I stepped onto the platform there was no doubt I was back in New York - on the platform with me moving purposefully towards the station entrance were hundreds of people, all collected from the dozen or so stops between here and New Haven. "Shit", I thought. "All these people got on this train to come to New York on a random Sunday. This line has a train arriving every half hour on Sunday. On weekdays during peak-hour, this train runs every ten minutes. Hundreds upon hundreds of people commuting back and forth every freakin' day. That's nuts!"
As my tiny mind reeled from considering the sheer numbers of people moving back and forth along this single train line out of hundreds of others in New York my fellow passengers and I entered Grand Central. Inside we joined thousands more people all either catching trains or leaving trains or greeting friends or seeing loved ones off or trying to sell shit to everyone else. And outside, unseen, were millions upon millions of other people determinedly, busily, relentlessly doing whatever it is people do in New York. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Suddenly, New York seemed to be impossible. How many people were outside the station? Where do they live? How do they all fit? How do they get their food? There's certainly no bloody farms here - there's barely even grass here. Where does their rubbish go? (A goodly proportion of it seems to end up on the sidewalk outside my house, but perhaps I'm being finicky). How the hell does it all operate? How can it even exist? Why doesn't this city just end up as a big, chaotic, stinking hole-in-the-ground, its inhabitants reduced to a sub-human scrabble for survival? (I mean more so than now. You know, without the musicals.)
I needed to know. So I did some comparative research. Orange has a population of about 38,000 people and takes up about 25 square kilometres of the Australian continent (I didn't actually find an official measurement on this, I just looked at Orange on googlemaps and held my thumb and forefinger against the scale and compared it to Orange on the map. It looks like about 25 square kilometres to me). Orange is a primary producer of quite a number of foodstuffs including pears, apples, stone fruit, animal produce, and of course, bucketloads of wine (but, as we all know, not oranges).
Orange is also the proud owner of Springhill airport, which cheerfully hosts 1,300 flights a year for about 60,000 passengers. It has 7 different bus routes, which can take you all the way from Warrendine to Blechington. All this food and transport and busy Orange-folk generate about 54,000 tonnes of rubbish every year, which ends up in the Ophir Road landfill (although during my research it turns out that this will fill up in about four years. Keep your eyes out for more news on this fascinating topic).
Conversely...
New York is home to about 19,500,000 people jammed into about 780 square kilometres (and Australia has a population of about 21,000,000). That means there's 25 people per square metre of New York. (Orange enjoys spacious luxury with each square metre being taken up by a mere 1.5 persons). Add to that the tourists that traipse up and down Times Square every day and the population swells an additional 8,600,000 a year, 420,000 of which are Aussies. To get there, these visitors and other travellers probably arrive and depart via one of the three international airports in New York, which hosts 1,360,000 million flights a year, welcoming or waving off 110,000,000 passengers. While in New York they probably take advantage of New York's famous subway, consisting of 24 routes servicing 468 individual stations to take the 1.58 billion individual commuters around the city annually.
All these people need to eat, so New York imports all of its food. This includes 5,400 tonnes of meat, 9,800 tonnes of cereal, 27,300 tonnes of fruit and vegetables and 5,000 tonnes of booze daily, for a grand total of 28,600,000 tonnes of food a year. FYI, the Statue of Liberty weighs 225 tonnes, and the Empire State Building weighs 325,000 tonnes.
That's a shitload of food.
Literally. New York also generates 5,600,000 tonnes of rubbish (or "trash") a year. Proving that Americans can be mysterious and paranoid about just about anything, this rubbish is packed into containers and floated away on barges to a top secret location. No shit. I couldn't find statistics on sewage (probably for the best... hope you're not eating breakfast) but I bet it's a wee bit more than Orange (pun totally intended, bitchez).
It's not surprising then that it can be overwhelming to think that all these people with all this activity and all this industry is bubbling away around you constantly. I can see how people here can feel completely disconnected from other human beings. It's not that there's no one else around, it's that there's so many people here that you ask yourself - how can my little voice be heard in all this noise?
This was all ticking in my head last weekend as I got on my subway to head home - I am living in a f#*king big place. I had to make a brief stop in a new part of town to get a keyboard. I got off the subway, walked up the stairs, and standing at the top as though we were outside the Orange Post Office on Summer Street, was Ellie, calm as a buddhist monk and apparently completely unsurprised to see me.
Lucky her. I was always worried about how I'd cope with the hustle and bustle of the big city because I'm a country boy at heart. So when Daniel invited me to visit him in little New Haven last weekend, I happily accepted.
He seems to be settling in alright (at the very least there's been no more vitriolic encounters with cab drivers or the police. Yet). After a couple of weeks in New York, it was kind of strange to be in a little country town again. New Haven is kind of like Orange - it's fresh and open with lots of great food and beautiful houses, but at night it can be a pretty dodgy and there's certain neighbourhoods you don't walk alone in unless you have a bunch of pesky money taking up valuable space in your wallet and you need some thoughtful mugger to take it off your hands.
When it came time to head back home I jumped on the train and choo-chooed my way two hours south back to Grand Central Station. As I stepped onto the platform there was no doubt I was back in New York - on the platform with me moving purposefully towards the station entrance were hundreds of people, all collected from the dozen or so stops between here and New Haven. "Shit", I thought. "All these people got on this train to come to New York on a random Sunday. This line has a train arriving every half hour on Sunday. On weekdays during peak-hour, this train runs every ten minutes. Hundreds upon hundreds of people commuting back and forth every freakin' day. That's nuts!"
As my tiny mind reeled from considering the sheer numbers of people moving back and forth along this single train line out of hundreds of others in New York my fellow passengers and I entered Grand Central. Inside we joined thousands more people all either catching trains or leaving trains or greeting friends or seeing loved ones off or trying to sell shit to everyone else. And outside, unseen, were millions upon millions of other people determinedly, busily, relentlessly doing whatever it is people do in New York. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Suddenly, New York seemed to be impossible. How many people were outside the station? Where do they live? How do they all fit? How do they get their food? There's certainly no bloody farms here - there's barely even grass here. Where does their rubbish go? (A goodly proportion of it seems to end up on the sidewalk outside my house, but perhaps I'm being finicky). How the hell does it all operate? How can it even exist? Why doesn't this city just end up as a big, chaotic, stinking hole-in-the-ground, its inhabitants reduced to a sub-human scrabble for survival? (I mean more so than now. You know, without the musicals.)
I needed to know. So I did some comparative research. Orange has a population of about 38,000 people and takes up about 25 square kilometres of the Australian continent (I didn't actually find an official measurement on this, I just looked at Orange on googlemaps and held my thumb and forefinger against the scale and compared it to Orange on the map. It looks like about 25 square kilometres to me). Orange is a primary producer of quite a number of foodstuffs including pears, apples, stone fruit, animal produce, and of course, bucketloads of wine (but, as we all know, not oranges).
Orange is also the proud owner of Springhill airport, which cheerfully hosts 1,300 flights a year for about 60,000 passengers. It has 7 different bus routes, which can take you all the way from Warrendine to Blechington. All this food and transport and busy Orange-folk generate about 54,000 tonnes of rubbish every year, which ends up in the Ophir Road landfill (although during my research it turns out that this will fill up in about four years. Keep your eyes out for more news on this fascinating topic).
Conversely...
New York is home to about 19,500,000 people jammed into about 780 square kilometres (and Australia has a population of about 21,000,000). That means there's 25 people per square metre of New York. (Orange enjoys spacious luxury with each square metre being taken up by a mere 1.5 persons). Add to that the tourists that traipse up and down Times Square every day and the population swells an additional 8,600,000 a year, 420,000 of which are Aussies. To get there, these visitors and other travellers probably arrive and depart via one of the three international airports in New York, which hosts 1,360,000 million flights a year, welcoming or waving off 110,000,000 passengers. While in New York they probably take advantage of New York's famous subway, consisting of 24 routes servicing 468 individual stations to take the 1.58 billion individual commuters around the city annually.
All these people need to eat, so New York imports all of its food. This includes 5,400 tonnes of meat, 9,800 tonnes of cereal, 27,300 tonnes of fruit and vegetables and 5,000 tonnes of booze daily, for a grand total of 28,600,000 tonnes of food a year. FYI, the Statue of Liberty weighs 225 tonnes, and the Empire State Building weighs 325,000 tonnes.
That's a shitload of food.
Literally. New York also generates 5,600,000 tonnes of rubbish (or "trash") a year. Proving that Americans can be mysterious and paranoid about just about anything, this rubbish is packed into containers and floated away on barges to a top secret location. No shit. I couldn't find statistics on sewage (probably for the best... hope you're not eating breakfast) but I bet it's a wee bit more than Orange (pun totally intended, bitchez).
It's not surprising then that it can be overwhelming to think that all these people with all this activity and all this industry is bubbling away around you constantly. I can see how people here can feel completely disconnected from other human beings. It's not that there's no one else around, it's that there's so many people here that you ask yourself - how can my little voice be heard in all this noise?
This was all ticking in my head last weekend as I got on my subway to head home - I am living in a f#*king big place. I had to make a brief stop in a new part of town to get a keyboard. I got off the subway, walked up the stairs, and standing at the top as though we were outside the Orange Post Office on Summer Street, was Ellie, calm as a buddhist monk and apparently completely unsurprised to see me.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
A Moving Story
Moving is a pain in the arse. Moving overseas is a massive pain in the arse. And moving to New York and trying to find a place to live two weeks before university starts is such a staggeringly daunting task that to describe the level of arse-pain experienced requires those sciencey words usually reserved for astrophysicists trying to convey just how f#@king big something is. Fortunately for me, I managed to land a place to live before I left Australia (fortunate especially since I don't know any astrophysicists). Even still, the comedy of errors that was Moving Day was still a goddam pain in the arse.
I inherited a room off my close friend Daniel. He's lived happily in this little apartment in Brooklyn for two years now. The room is big with lots of light, it's on the third floor away from the noisy street, and not too expensive - a real find by anyone's standards, and (I'm led to believe) especially rare for New York. Anyway, he's a composer too, and a darn good one at that, so much so that he got into Yale in New Haven, about two hours out of New York. He offered me his room, and knowing what a goddam mothering pain in the freakin' arse it was going to be to try to find one myself, I happily accepted. All I had to do was give him a hand moving out, then go and get my own things to move in. Piece of cake.
At 7am on Thursday Daniel goes to collect a small truck for the move. Daniel wakes me at 8am to carry the bed I was fast asleep on down the stairs to the truck. Within two minutes of waking up I'm walking backwards in my pyjamas carrying a mattress down two flights of stairs so narrow and steep it might be more appropriate to call them "ladders". I neglect to have breakfast, which proves to be a big mistake ten minutes later when we're carrying his 100kg keyboard down the stairs and I almost black out from hypoglycemia. Daniel manages somehow to get down to my end (although God knows how since the piano pretty much filled the width of the stairwell) and holds it while I collapse and pant pitifully for a few moments at his feet trying not to vomit up my non-existent breakfast. I eat a banana and feel better. The move continues.
Half an hour later we're on the road. We have to go to Washington Heights to collect Daniel's new housemate Wayne and his few belongings. Washington Heights is about as far away as you can go from where we are and still be in New York. Googlemaps estimates the trip to be fifteen minutes. An hour later we arrive outside Wayne's place whereupon Daniel accidentally sideswipes a parked cab, breaking its mirror. Daniel swears a lot and bangs the steering wheel a little bit. The elderly cab driver abuses us through the truck window in Spanish. The accident attracts what appears to be every elderly Spanish-speaking cab driver in a fifty-mile radius, and soon the air is filled with shrugged shoulders and shaking heads, angry fingers pointed at the truck as though it was a tank, angry fingers pointed at Daniel as though he was a thoughtless retard, all accompanied by so much Spanish that I think I now know how to speak it.
Daniel has to call the police to lodge an accident report in order to claim the insurance. The cadre of Spanish-speaking cab drivers insist that he just give them the money for the mirror. I leave this lively exchange to meet Wayne and help him load his stuff into the back of the truck. Meanwhile the police arrive, looking shitty for having to come and deal with a broken mirror. They talk to Daniel. They talk to the cab driver. They go to the police car and write stuff down. They talk to Daniel again. They talk to the cab driver again. They return to the police car and write more stuff down. Again they talk to Daniel. Again they talk to the cab driver. The cab driver points at me. The police come to me. They ask me if I was driving the vehicle. I boggle. They tell me the elderly cab driver is now insisting that I was driving the truck. They ask for my drivers license. I give it to them but explain (quite calmly, I think) that I was not driving the truck, because if I did attempt to drive a truck from one end of New York to the other on the right-hand side of the road in traffic so heavy it could warp space-time that we probably would have had a much more serious accident than a mere broken mirror before I'd had a chance to get into third gear. They agree but they still take down my drivers license details (which I hope doesn't bite me in the butt one day).
An hour later the accident report is filled out, the cab drivers disperse, and we are finally on the road to New Haven. Fortunately there are no further incidents that could jeopardise the move, my health, or anyone's freedom. We get Daniel and Wayne's stuff inside, drop off the truck, catch a train back to New York, and get drunk.
So now it's my turn to move. The very next day I begin the quest to furnish my room. I'm kind of excited - I've never actually bought furniture apart from the bed I bought when I was twenty-one. I find a great used furniture shop about six blocks from my house and pick out a nice chest of drawers, a mirror, an awesome armchair upholstered in green faux-velvet, and what looks like a cute little wardrobe.
Now, I'm aware that standard practice when one moves house is to measure things. Things like say, the width of doors, or the height of ceilings, or even the weight of items that might require transport through said doors and under aforementioned ceilings. I foolishly neglected to do so. When my wardrobe shows up I realise that in the context of the massive furniture warehouse it looked all tiny and cosy, but now, in the foyer of my building, it looks like someone chopped down an entire forest and turned it into one piece of furniture.
I won't go into excruciating detail of what I shall henceforth refer to as "The Ordeal of August 27th", but let's just say there's still bits of ceiling plaster embedded in the doorhandles from when we had to physically pass this monstrosity over the banisters because it couldn't be negotiated around the turn in the stairs. Whoever inherits this room after me is going to get a wardrobe thrown into the bargain because that thing is not going anywhere ever again except in little tiny pieces.
For now however, the worst is over. I'm having a desk delivered tomorrow (and they WILL be carrying it up the stairs) and then I'm pretty much set. My room is big, it's light, and since it's on the third floor it's away from the street noise (a positive point that somehow slipped my mind during last week's move when I cursed mankind for ever endeavoring to build buildings with more than one floor - are we so PROUD?!...ahem...), it has polished wooden floors and big windows, it's relatively cool in the summer nights and Daniel assures me it's plenty warm in winter. I've become a cliche - a poor artist living in a loft in New York. F#*king tops.
I inherited a room off my close friend Daniel. He's lived happily in this little apartment in Brooklyn for two years now. The room is big with lots of light, it's on the third floor away from the noisy street, and not too expensive - a real find by anyone's standards, and (I'm led to believe) especially rare for New York. Anyway, he's a composer too, and a darn good one at that, so much so that he got into Yale in New Haven, about two hours out of New York. He offered me his room, and knowing what a goddam mothering pain in the freakin' arse it was going to be to try to find one myself, I happily accepted. All I had to do was give him a hand moving out, then go and get my own things to move in. Piece of cake.
At 7am on Thursday Daniel goes to collect a small truck for the move. Daniel wakes me at 8am to carry the bed I was fast asleep on down the stairs to the truck. Within two minutes of waking up I'm walking backwards in my pyjamas carrying a mattress down two flights of stairs so narrow and steep it might be more appropriate to call them "ladders". I neglect to have breakfast, which proves to be a big mistake ten minutes later when we're carrying his 100kg keyboard down the stairs and I almost black out from hypoglycemia. Daniel manages somehow to get down to my end (although God knows how since the piano pretty much filled the width of the stairwell) and holds it while I collapse and pant pitifully for a few moments at his feet trying not to vomit up my non-existent breakfast. I eat a banana and feel better. The move continues.
Half an hour later we're on the road. We have to go to Washington Heights to collect Daniel's new housemate Wayne and his few belongings. Washington Heights is about as far away as you can go from where we are and still be in New York. Googlemaps estimates the trip to be fifteen minutes. An hour later we arrive outside Wayne's place whereupon Daniel accidentally sideswipes a parked cab, breaking its mirror. Daniel swears a lot and bangs the steering wheel a little bit. The elderly cab driver abuses us through the truck window in Spanish. The accident attracts what appears to be every elderly Spanish-speaking cab driver in a fifty-mile radius, and soon the air is filled with shrugged shoulders and shaking heads, angry fingers pointed at the truck as though it was a tank, angry fingers pointed at Daniel as though he was a thoughtless retard, all accompanied by so much Spanish that I think I now know how to speak it.
Daniel has to call the police to lodge an accident report in order to claim the insurance. The cadre of Spanish-speaking cab drivers insist that he just give them the money for the mirror. I leave this lively exchange to meet Wayne and help him load his stuff into the back of the truck. Meanwhile the police arrive, looking shitty for having to come and deal with a broken mirror. They talk to Daniel. They talk to the cab driver. They go to the police car and write stuff down. They talk to Daniel again. They talk to the cab driver again. They return to the police car and write more stuff down. Again they talk to Daniel. Again they talk to the cab driver. The cab driver points at me. The police come to me. They ask me if I was driving the vehicle. I boggle. They tell me the elderly cab driver is now insisting that I was driving the truck. They ask for my drivers license. I give it to them but explain (quite calmly, I think) that I was not driving the truck, because if I did attempt to drive a truck from one end of New York to the other on the right-hand side of the road in traffic so heavy it could warp space-time that we probably would have had a much more serious accident than a mere broken mirror before I'd had a chance to get into third gear. They agree but they still take down my drivers license details (which I hope doesn't bite me in the butt one day).
An hour later the accident report is filled out, the cab drivers disperse, and we are finally on the road to New Haven. Fortunately there are no further incidents that could jeopardise the move, my health, or anyone's freedom. We get Daniel and Wayne's stuff inside, drop off the truck, catch a train back to New York, and get drunk.
So now it's my turn to move. The very next day I begin the quest to furnish my room. I'm kind of excited - I've never actually bought furniture apart from the bed I bought when I was twenty-one. I find a great used furniture shop about six blocks from my house and pick out a nice chest of drawers, a mirror, an awesome armchair upholstered in green faux-velvet, and what looks like a cute little wardrobe.
Now, I'm aware that standard practice when one moves house is to measure things. Things like say, the width of doors, or the height of ceilings, or even the weight of items that might require transport through said doors and under aforementioned ceilings. I foolishly neglected to do so. When my wardrobe shows up I realise that in the context of the massive furniture warehouse it looked all tiny and cosy, but now, in the foyer of my building, it looks like someone chopped down an entire forest and turned it into one piece of furniture.
I won't go into excruciating detail of what I shall henceforth refer to as "The Ordeal of August 27th", but let's just say there's still bits of ceiling plaster embedded in the doorhandles from when we had to physically pass this monstrosity over the banisters because it couldn't be negotiated around the turn in the stairs. Whoever inherits this room after me is going to get a wardrobe thrown into the bargain because that thing is not going anywhere ever again except in little tiny pieces.
For now however, the worst is over. I'm having a desk delivered tomorrow (and they WILL be carrying it up the stairs) and then I'm pretty much set. My room is big, it's light, and since it's on the third floor it's away from the street noise (a positive point that somehow slipped my mind during last week's move when I cursed mankind for ever endeavoring to build buildings with more than one floor - are we so PROUD?!...ahem...), it has polished wooden floors and big windows, it's relatively cool in the summer nights and Daniel assures me it's plenty warm in winter. I've become a cliche - a poor artist living in a loft in New York. F#*king tops.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
New York Minute
There cannot possibly be a breed of person more aware of how valuable their time is than a New Yorker. I discovered this about seven minutes after my arrival at JFK airport when I dared to get into a cab merely knowing the street address of the apartment I was staying at and not also the nearest intersection.
I told the cab driver my address - 343 South 5th Street, Brooklyn*. In my experience with cabs across the globe, this is generally sufficient information for a successful journey. Apparently not.
"What's the nearest cross-street?" the guy barks at me from the front seat.
"What?" I ask.
"The nearest cross-street. Brooklyn is huge. What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I uh... don't know."
"What?! Whaddaya mean ya don't know?! How do you expect me to get you there without knowing the nearest cross street?"
"Well don't you have a GPS or a street directory or something?" He ignores this.
"What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I already TOLD you, I don't know the name of the nearest cross-street."
"Well how do you expect me to get you there?"
I'm beginning to sense a certain Waiting for Godot quality to the conversation, so I mumble that I have been there before (over a year ago, mind you) and if I study my map of Brooklyn I might be able to recall the nearest cross-street. This almost placates him until I foolishly suggest we begin to drive to Brooklyn (this altercation has thus far occurred in the taxi bay at JFK in front of hundreds of other people).
"Sir," the guy says, like I'm missing a chromosome. "If you don't know where you're going there's no point in starting the journey."
"I DO know where I'm going," I almost shriek in frustration. "343 South 5th Street Brooklyn!"
"And what's the name of the nearest cross-street?"
"Goddammit!" I yell. (I think this qualifies me as an official New Yorker now). So I bury my head in my little pocket guide of New York trying to find where the hell I'm supposed to go. The cab driver is not content with our impromptu performance being a two-hander, and so he decides to recruit more performers into the show by leaning out the window and shouting to the taxi-queue manager, "This guy wants to go to Brooklyn but he doesn't know the nearest cross-street."
"What the hell?" the queue-manager says, staring at me as though I've just announced that I think it perfectly reasonable to attend a christening in a gimp-suit.
"Yeah," the cab-driver says, "how does he expect me to take him somewhere if he doesn't know where he wants to go?"
I'm really getting pissed-off now. I'm not really in a very good mood to begin with. I've just spent 24 hours in transit - 21 on a plane and 3 in customs queues - after having not slept my last night in Australia because I was too excited. This, compounded by the fact that the two nights prior to my departure were spent getting completely written-off means that I haven't had deep, non-hungover sleep since the previous Thursday. So when this guy starts leaning out his window shouting to all and sundry about the foolish Australian cluttering up the back seat of his cab with the audacity to request transport to an address without having an intimate knowledge of the destination borough, something inside me snapped.
"HEY," I said. "I've TOLD you already I want to go to 343 South-5th Street in BROOKLYN."
"And what's the nearest..."
"Do you have a GPS?"
"What's the nearest..."
"DO you HAVE a GPS?!"
"Yes sir I do."
"Then I WANT TO GO TO 343 SOUTH-5th STREET IN BROOKLYN."
There was a sigh, some typing on a GPS, and about ten seconds later we were on our way, which was a little ironic considering we had just spent five minutes immobile in the taxi bay because, to the cab-driver, his time was so freakin' important that he would be better off demanding that I somehow conjure the information he wanted from the ether rather than spend the three nanoseconds it would have taken to type the info into his goddam GPS.
So New York operates under the premise of hyper-efficiency. Everything from food to transport to dry-cleaning is undertaken with the minimum of fuss and pretense. Conversation between customers and servers is generally kept civil yet basic, none of this pesky "how are you today" or sometimes even "please" or "thank you" to waste everyone's time. Go to a diner and you'll be given a menu slightly thicker than a phone book. You can order anything you want on it and reasonably expect it to be at your table before you've had time to warm up your seat. Trains zip around on the subway so regularly they may as well install a high-speed conveyer-belt instead.
And to be honest, it's probably just as well. New York is, of course, freakin' ENORMOUS (well, to a little ol' country boy from 'Straya it is) and the city would grind to a halt if everyone spent all day naval-gazing while waiting for a train or engaging in prolonged social niceties every time they wanted a cup of coffee. Even still, it can sometimes be a bit intimidating. As such, I try to adopt the philosophy of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".
I think of my experience with the cab-driver outside JFK airport as my initiation.
*Lest you think I'm clueless enough in this age of electronic-identity-theft to publish my address, this is a fake address. Obviously I told the cab-driver my real address though (duh.)
I told the cab driver my address - 343 South 5th Street, Brooklyn*. In my experience with cabs across the globe, this is generally sufficient information for a successful journey. Apparently not.
"What's the nearest cross-street?" the guy barks at me from the front seat.
"What?" I ask.
"The nearest cross-street. Brooklyn is huge. What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I uh... don't know."
"What?! Whaddaya mean ya don't know?! How do you expect me to get you there without knowing the nearest cross street?"
"Well don't you have a GPS or a street directory or something?" He ignores this.
"What's the nearest cross-street?"
"I already TOLD you, I don't know the name of the nearest cross-street."
"Well how do you expect me to get you there?"
I'm beginning to sense a certain Waiting for Godot quality to the conversation, so I mumble that I have been there before (over a year ago, mind you) and if I study my map of Brooklyn I might be able to recall the nearest cross-street. This almost placates him until I foolishly suggest we begin to drive to Brooklyn (this altercation has thus far occurred in the taxi bay at JFK in front of hundreds of other people).
"Sir," the guy says, like I'm missing a chromosome. "If you don't know where you're going there's no point in starting the journey."
"I DO know where I'm going," I almost shriek in frustration. "343 South 5th Street Brooklyn!"
"And what's the name of the nearest cross-street?"
"Goddammit!" I yell. (I think this qualifies me as an official New Yorker now). So I bury my head in my little pocket guide of New York trying to find where the hell I'm supposed to go. The cab driver is not content with our impromptu performance being a two-hander, and so he decides to recruit more performers into the show by leaning out the window and shouting to the taxi-queue manager, "This guy wants to go to Brooklyn but he doesn't know the nearest cross-street."
"What the hell?" the queue-manager says, staring at me as though I've just announced that I think it perfectly reasonable to attend a christening in a gimp-suit.
"Yeah," the cab-driver says, "how does he expect me to take him somewhere if he doesn't know where he wants to go?"
I'm really getting pissed-off now. I'm not really in a very good mood to begin with. I've just spent 24 hours in transit - 21 on a plane and 3 in customs queues - after having not slept my last night in Australia because I was too excited. This, compounded by the fact that the two nights prior to my departure were spent getting completely written-off means that I haven't had deep, non-hungover sleep since the previous Thursday. So when this guy starts leaning out his window shouting to all and sundry about the foolish Australian cluttering up the back seat of his cab with the audacity to request transport to an address without having an intimate knowledge of the destination borough, something inside me snapped.
"HEY," I said. "I've TOLD you already I want to go to 343 South-5th Street in BROOKLYN."
"And what's the nearest..."
"Do you have a GPS?"
"What's the nearest..."
"DO you HAVE a GPS?!"
"Yes sir I do."
"Then I WANT TO GO TO 343 SOUTH-5th STREET IN BROOKLYN."
There was a sigh, some typing on a GPS, and about ten seconds later we were on our way, which was a little ironic considering we had just spent five minutes immobile in the taxi bay because, to the cab-driver, his time was so freakin' important that he would be better off demanding that I somehow conjure the information he wanted from the ether rather than spend the three nanoseconds it would have taken to type the info into his goddam GPS.
So New York operates under the premise of hyper-efficiency. Everything from food to transport to dry-cleaning is undertaken with the minimum of fuss and pretense. Conversation between customers and servers is generally kept civil yet basic, none of this pesky "how are you today" or sometimes even "please" or "thank you" to waste everyone's time. Go to a diner and you'll be given a menu slightly thicker than a phone book. You can order anything you want on it and reasonably expect it to be at your table before you've had time to warm up your seat. Trains zip around on the subway so regularly they may as well install a high-speed conveyer-belt instead.
And to be honest, it's probably just as well. New York is, of course, freakin' ENORMOUS (well, to a little ol' country boy from 'Straya it is) and the city would grind to a halt if everyone spent all day naval-gazing while waiting for a train or engaging in prolonged social niceties every time they wanted a cup of coffee. Even still, it can sometimes be a bit intimidating. As such, I try to adopt the philosophy of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".
I think of my experience with the cab-driver outside JFK airport as my initiation.
*Lest you think I'm clueless enough in this age of electronic-identity-theft to publish my address, this is a fake address. Obviously I told the cab-driver my real address though (duh.)
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