Today, I’ll tell you about everything I’ve done in New York. Now the first day that I got here, I went for the India Day Parade which I mentioned earlier. It’s been happening in New York on the 15th of August for the past 30 years. This was surprising because as far as I know we only have one parade in India on Independence day and that happens in New Delhi. So even Bombay doesn’t have a parade. But New York is just the kind of place where people have parades. I doubt you’ll find a more diverse population in any other city, and yet, there’s something for everyone. I think having parades is a brilliant idea. It keeps people happy, it makes people get out. We have our festivals back in India and they’re bigger and involve more people than a small parade here. But that’s the point. You hardly ever feel like you belong in any such gathering the way you would feel you belong in a parade for or about something that you care about. I’m not saying I completely felt like I belonged in the India Day parade, because some of the people here are not like me at all, but there was Indian food, kebabs and tandoori chicken on the street, Bollywood music, etc. A long stretch of road in the middle of New York was closed off for this parade. And I’m sure there are people here who wish they could go on with their lives and didn’t have to put up with things like parades blocking their way, but this city wouldn’t be so culturally rich without these things. The parade itself was quite cool, I’m not going to post the pictures here because there are too many, so instead I’m going to link you to the facebook album. You can also see videos here , here and here .
After this, apart from going to work I mostly slept until Tuesday. Tuesday evening I went for a jog in the park near my house. When I say near I mean about 50 steps away. This park is really pretty, it has a jogging track, a basketball court where kids play football in the evenings, plenty of benches, a children’s playground, an area in the middle with a roof and it’s on the top of a hill so you can see the sunset all the way from here. Things like jogging and exercising happen easily here because of the facilities and and the weather. Also because of the food. The food here, deserves a paragraph to itself.
The servings here are huge. And I mean huge. Big enough to keep me full from lunch right up till dinner. And I’m used to eating something every 2 hours. One helping of anything here should keep you full for half a day. Even at Subway, which tastes exactly the same as the Subway in India except with better meat, I ordered a footlong for lunch. I don’t remember the last time I ordered a footlong in India. I ordered a footlong here because it doesn’t cost that much more than a 6 inch. You’re just tempted to buy a footlong instead. And if you ever buy a coke at Subway, I know you’re not going to finish it alone. A 3 musketeers bar from the vending machine in my office lasted me a whole day and I still have a quarter slice of cheesecake in my fridge that I bought on Sunday night. The food here is also awesome. The amount of variety here is crazy, and remember, I’m coming from India. The Indian food here is really authentic Indian food and I’m guessing this applies to all the other kinds of food here. And no, I’m not saying that the pizza here is authentic Italian but I’m sure you’ll get authentic Italian food if you go to an Italian restaurant. In conclusion, there are way too many places you can get food from and a lot of different types of food.
To travel to work, I walk about a hundred steps from my house from where I get a bus that takes me to the train station that seems to come every 2-3 minutes. The buses are all air conditioned, and heated in the winter. The trains here are a little complicated and I still haven’t quite figured out how they work because there are too many different lines. The trains all run mostly underground which makes traveling in them quite boring. Luckily they don’t take long to get anywhere. I get off at 14th street and 6th avenue, from where I have to walk around 7 minutes to my office building on 17th street after 7th avenue. The roads here are mostly all numbered like this. Finding an address is never hard.
You know, I don’t much like writing a blog post like this. I don’t like telling you what I did and I don’t much like telling you the details of my day to day life. It makes everything sound so mundane. I’m going to end this blog post here, tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Cake Shop and Times Square, and hopefully I’ll find a more creative way of doing it.
Goodnight.