estro

Long work days starting before 7am? Not so much...

But I am enjoying what little of my NYC free time I have managed. A handful of truncated thoughts:

New York is as much of a bike town as SF with bike lanes everywhere. Oddly there are few bike racks, so it seems like there isn't a street sign or parking meeter within a block radius of any popular destination that doesn't have a bike or two locked up to it.

Meeting new friends of friends FTW.

Food here is more expensive than even the bay area. That being said, the Green Tea Grand Mariner Cake was strange but delicious.

I think some of what makes the NY subway so much more effective than BART and Muni is that it is so much older. There are a whole lot of things that stations don't have to accomplish due to existing before the relevant regulations (Wheelchair accessibility and platform safety come to mind) that clearly are a huge fiscal overhead for newer transit systems..

So many people in such a small space! This probably explains the dearth of non-Starbucks cafe's that are good for sitting with a book for an hour. (Though SoHo does have a higher winebar per block number than even Palo Alto, tea is preferable when I am slightly sleep deprived)

While I do notice graffiti in my neighborhood, I hadn't realized how much I had retained of the omnipresent illegible tags as I keep having mild flashes of something not being quite right when I look at otherwise identical structures such as mailboxes and the back of stop-signs.