As you may all have guessed, life is lived completely different out here in the big city. I guess that it may make a difference that we live in such a highly hispanic area. Our biggest adjustment had to have been the noise. Unlike good old quiet Utah, there are so many sounds constantly! Possibly the only quiet time around here is between 5 and 7 o'clock on Sunday mornings...that is my favorite time! Then of course you can always got to the temple and get silence (except for now because the temple is closed for cleaning). It is such a major adjustment to learn to shut out all of the little and big noises. ie. subway, buses, people walking, music blaring, cars honking, big trucks, people yelling, parties until 5 am, planes, ambulances, and so on. But now we are a little more trained to shut that out. Shopping is an adjustment too. I like to go grocery shopping as little as possible so in Utah I would stock up. But because of the lack of storage space and car to haul it home in, I have gone to the grocery store a minimum of three times a week...so far until I can get a better system down. Also, food is expensive! But we found a less expensive grocery store with more of a selection. Then there are the bi-weekly farmer's markets. Those things sell the best produce and usually cost less than the grocery stores. Plus we rode our bikes to a Target on Labor day. It was only about two miles from our house and it had normal prices! We were kind of in awe when we walked in, it was so huge compared to what we were used to.
Where we live, manhattan is only a half mile wide. As you may have heard, there are all kinds of people living in NY from poorest poor to the highly educated and very rich. You can see all of that just by walking the width of the island! You need to know where you are going and know what streets are better to avoid.
Socializing consists of placing your lawn chair on the sidewalk in front of your building and talking to passer-bys or attend your local bar, or if you have a family...the park! The first time we went on a walk through the park in the evening, it was incredible! I have never seen a park so packed in my life except for a county fair or a concert. Everyone and their kid or dog (take your pick out here) is at the park every evening playing, talking, reading, playing chess (yes, just like the movies!) and anything else you can think of to do at a park! The parks out here as you can imagine are very coveted space, they are constantly busy with people. We like to find parks where you don't see as many people and enjoy it while we can. There are a lot of parks up where we live, we love it! We pass about five parks just on our walk from church.
One day, I went over to the park to read for a little bit and saw a guy and a girl filming some independent film about his soccer playing. By the way, we see movies being filmed all over this place. Nearly every outing we have been on to downtown we have seen something being filmed. Anyway, then the soccer player wanted to get a shot of him kicking the ball and hitting someone passing by. So he had the girl walk into the shot and then would kick the ball and hit her. Each time I saw her turn towards me after being hit and silently saying "Ow!" I felt so bad! But I also wondered why she was even letting him do it. She must have been some intern or getting paid for it...hopefully!
Then there are all of the crazy drivers! Wow. People seem to never get into wrecks around here, but they do some crazy stuff. Like the other day, we saw this big Fed-Ex truck stop and completely turn around in the middle of an intersection ignoring all of the cars trying to get through the intersection. Driver cross those double yellow lines like they weren't there just to get around other cars.
Columbia University is also a different world from the Universities that we are used to. All of Der's professors are so intelligent and highly educated. They will be talking about some famous theory or textbook and casually say "oh by the way, Prof So and So from our department wrote this." Plus for those of you who haven't heard already; Chelsea Clinton is in Der's program. He will have almost every class with her. He has been to three of his five classes as of today and he is loving it already.
