Traveling, writing, and living around the world
A year ago, my life changed in what turned out to be a positive way. I learned that I would have to leave Australia, a situation I knew was on the horizon but was holding on to hope that things would change and I could stay. I refrain from using the word my life changed for the ‘better’, which I have used in the past and which people told me on a daily basis: “You’re so much better off. This was all for the best.”
It’s the blizzard that wasn’t — at least not for New Yorkers. New York City was completely shut down, curfew enforced and all, leading up to Juno, the name of what was said to potentially be one of the most historic blizzards of all time.
Monday through Friday, I always wake up just before 6 in the morning so I can catch the 6:28 R train from Bay Ridge toward the city. A few stops in, at 59th street, I transfer to the N train, which runs express through Brooklyn into the city so that I arrive in Flatiron area a few minutes after 7 to go the gym.
I was born and raised in southwest Brooklyn in a middle-class enclave of Italian and Irish Catholic families. Go one neighborhood over, and you’ll feel like you’re in China. That’s the thing about Brooklyn: Every neighborhood is different and is its own world entirely.
Whenever I traveled and told people I was from New York (yes, actually from New York), they’d flood me with a series of questions: Is life really like what you see in Sex and The City? Have you ever been shot? Do you hate New Jersey?
And then they’d ask me the details – what to do, where to go, what to see, where to eat (Peppino’s, obviously). Or, they’d start talking to me about a summer they spent living in the city or living in Williamsburg, and have I ever been to X,Y, or Z?
