A walk, indifferently

It’s the city I long to be back so many times but only previously ‘can-get-no-satisfaction’ with a short stay. New York, New York, that is.

This time I had an opportunity to stay for more than two weeks during the peak of a holiday season, to spend Christmas with a portion of my family. So I redirected my flight home via JFK Airport and delayed the reconnection for 18 days hoping to see white winter in NYC. It was more than I had wanted. It was a white blizzard.

For more than ten days at my daughter’s family apartment in Tribeca I tried to recuperate from a cold and coughs that tagged along from Garnjanaburi, Thailand. The effort was in vein and overwhelmed with long term jet lag of sleeping two sets of three hours a day at 3 in the afternoon and 10 O’clock nightly. The sickness also made it difficult to experience the city the old better way, by walking.

Though I got to go out of the apartment and walk the area twice everyday, my first two weeks in lower Manhattan was merely an indifferent exploratory of the locale. In cold weather between 26 and 34 degree Fahrenheit I enjoyed the scenery of high rises, new and old, in historical atmosphere near significant progress of rebuilding on ground zero. Sometimes I ventured uptown to So Ho and the west village or crisscrossed to old Chinatown and came around the financial district, but that did not give me much of an insight when my feeling was just to get back inside and out of accumulated biting coldness.

By the time my cold sickness has subsided and the coughs tamed, right after a not white Christmas, then too much of a snow blizzard came. White flakes were falling and blowing all the time during a supposedly shopaholic sales after Christmas day. Whiteness was everywhere on the opening ground. My first encounter with the snow storm was quite memorable for numbness in my fingers and freezing burns on my face.

The blizzard did not stay long but the snow piles do. New York City was such a brilliant mess I forgot about the numb and burn while I was playing in the snow with my grand children, comfortably. We walked to brunch along the streets where I captured a few spectacular images of some old buildings in the ‘Triangle Below Canal’ area. One interesting four stories built in 1897 still has its antique sheet metal veranda attached to it. Others were just merrily exposing in bright mounds of snow.

I can say that this time satisfaction has come to meet me in New York even when some major attractions of the city were missed. Of course I was taken to the circus show at Madison Square Garden, went to the market place in Grand Central, passed through the 5th Avenue and Time Square. Those were more like routines I couldn’t or shouldn’t avoid. But there are two new things I discovered in this trip to NYC. There are another Chinatown in Flushing and the diamonds rows on 47^th Street.

It is not much to talk about the Flushing Chinatown as it reminisces to the Monterey Park in Los Angeles. But a whole street of diamond shops on both sides of 47^th St. where there is no other kind of business was an amazing discovery. Beside, while walking half way into the street I looked up the second story of one diamond shop and stunned. There was a red bright neon sign lighted up in the midst of hazy gray air. A pair of vertically set four letter words angled to each other back to back said...

‘LOAN’.