New York City vs. London

It took me all of five minutes to come up with a topic on which to converse extensively--the differences between New York City and London. Having lived in various neighborhoods in New York for four years, I feel familiar with the vagaries, frustrations and delights to be found in that seething cesspool of humanity.

First the characteristics that make New York superior to London in every way:

-The food, the food, the food. Cheap food, fine food, Chinese food, Greek food. New York truly is the foodies' paradise on Earth. I've lost a few pounds in London in the past two months because a) food is exorbitantly expensive, b) when you do get food the portions are tiny--I like to call it bird-food tiny--and c) half of the time when you do get the exorbitantly expensive, tiny-portioned food, it tastes marginally edible. Terrible. Though an unintended positive side-effect of this culturally-sanctioned starvation diet is the near universal sveltness of the local population. I can now fit in my size 28 pants!

-The liquor. I am not a lush, but as man whose social life was as alcohol-soaked as any self-respecting New Yorker's tends to be, an unforeseen difficulty of living the poor student life in London is the near inaccessibility of good liquor in London bars. First, there seems to be an unconscionable bias towards beer. And the only beer accessible to my decreased purchasing power is the piss-poor, runny type that bloats you up like a 15 year old pregnant girl. In fact, when a New York friend came to visit me earlier in the semester we drank so much beer that we almost threw up on some crowded street corner in Soho. Horrible. Even when I feel spendthrifty and I order a liquored drink, London bars put up another barrier, which is the "regular" or "concentrated" convention, where bartenders give you one or two shots of vodka usually, which are then watered down with plenty of ice and a little chaser. All of this for the equivalent of $9 to $11. The 90% liquor/10% chaser drinks at $3 a pop of East Village dives are not known here. Sigh...

-The friendliness. The English, at least the identifiable Londoners, are colder, ruder and more standoffish than your typical New Yorker, which is hard to believe. Most of the time I have requested directions from English-looking, English-sounding people, and I get a barely-hidden scowl of annoyance and the summary brush-off. I rarely got similar treatment in New York. As a result, now I only request directions from immigrant-looking people, who most likely went through the same unfriendly welcome. Also, even though I'm in central London, why is it that of all the 20 or so friends I have made thus far only one or two are British? My fellow foreigners have reported similar experiences.

I could go on with the negatives, but don't get me wrong. I'm very satisfied with London's positives. Among the more notable are:

-The architecture, parkland and general cleanliness. Yes, London is less overwhelming and more human-sized than New York City's canyon-lands and treeless, concrete-overed expanses. Despite the shitty weather, I felt more comfortable far more quickly with London's surroundings than I did with New York. Granted, I think if I lived in Brooklyn, which is the most London-like of New York's boroughs, I would've felt differently. Alas I resided in Harlem and Queens during most of my time in New York, whose lack of green-space and general crappy architecture (especially in Queens) left lots to be desired. But in London there is no lack of the architecturally interesting, historical or beautiful. The general lack of trash and vermin also helps in my admiration for London's architecture. Then there are the trees that blanket London, and the tiny parks and squares which pop up all over the place. London in this respect beats New York hands down.

-The history. As a history freak, it is wonderful to wander about and reimagine London in Elizabethan or Roman days. Then in the rare moments when I can

First Impressions

Hello everyone! This is my first blog post ever. I've never been much of a computer person; my sheer impatience with these machines has impeded me from partaking fully in the 21st century, despite my grand old age of 26. What can I say, I'm a hard-core luddite at heart!

But after finding out that it's very easy to start a blog, and that I'm as self-involved and -absorbed as everyone in my generation, it became a logical leap to make, to start a blog tracking my life.

As the title makes clear, this will be a blog about the remainder of my year in England. Yes, I started a few months ago on a year-long master's in political economy at the London School of Economics, a college located in the heart of London. This blog will therefore be more about my impressions of my host country--its horrendous cuisine (at least cuisine available to a cash-strapped student), its mercurial weather, its high prices, its weak liquors, its laid-back attitude (in comparison to New York), and its delightful history and architecture.

I hope that I can keep this blog up to date, and that people will find my silly musings interesting enough to read, let alone follow. As soon as I figure out what to write about, I will post!