Tourism in America

First off, update notes:
1) I saw one of the rarest sights in New York this weekend. No it wasn't a meteorite or a giant ape climbing skyscrapers. Rather, I got into a yellow cab driven by a white American male.

Seriously, I've probably seen a driver from just about everywhere, but never a guy who talked like me. The dude had gotten a Master's in Education so I wasn't quite sure what his story was but he made for a very entertaining cab ride. I asked him how many other American cab drivers he knew, and he said 20, out of a total of around 30,000. Perhaps Cash Cab is among these. So that was pretty cool. Along this note I just want to say something about cabs here in the U.S. - I hope I didn't put off the impression that I ws disparaging immigrant drivers or anything. That would be pretty counter to the theme of this blog. I generally really enjoy getting into the car with someone from another country and routinely ask people about their experiences in Ethiopia, Sudan, Pakistan or Yemen (the last 4 that I can remember). Its just that the taxi driving trade has evolved into an immigrant one in recent years to the point that a white guy deserves mention in this blog post. I would also like to point out that our cab industry is very uniquely American. Every cab driver in China was Chinese and most drivers in Dublin were Irish, and so on for the rest of Europe. In addition, I have never seen a driver abroad talk on the cell phone during a ride. These two points might be related, because if I was abroad somewhere where I didn't speak the language well, driving a cab 12 hours a day, I'd want to shoot the shit with my friends every so often rather than listen to the bitchings of some overpampered passenger. But on the other hand, it can be really rude.

2) It dawned on me recently that Koreans have somehow subtly but steadily entered my life for about a year now. In Beijing, I lived in Wudaokou, which in addition to being a very Western part of town, is also the Korea-town of Beijing. I sang karaoke at a Korean place and had my first dog at a Korean restaurant. In Dublin, my roommate Sanghyup, who turned out to be one of the coolest people I had ever met, was straight from Seoul. Back at Georgetown, my roommate had a Korean girlfriend (this one's a stretch). Now in New York, I'm living a few blocks away from Korea-Town and do my grocery shopping there. I don't know what this all means, but perhaps I'm meant to study Korean and prevent nuclear war.

3) I went down to the waterfront with my roommates Griff and Streeter on Sunday. It took a while for us to get up but we finally set out at 3. Luckily these are some of the longest days of the year so we had great light the whole time. We got off at City Hall and checked out that building for a little bit, grabbed a bite at Blimpie's, then searched for the World Trade Center site. The whole site was compellingly massive and all under a maze of construction. The sheer size of the rebuilding puts a physical context to the severity of 9/11 - metaphorically, the 3 acre gaping hole still present in downtown Manhattan shadows in comparison to the gaping hole still present in our nation. We didn't make it to the memorial, we somehow walked by it, but I'd like to go back sometime.

We did make it to the Waterfront and probably walked along it for a good 15 blocks all the way to Battery Park. The area was really nice and very serene - for New York - and really could have been any number of places. It brought me back to both Portland and Hong Kong. The view was nice although it would have been nicer if we weren't staring at Jersey, and the harbor had a few very expensive boats including a sick speedboat. Really though, I had decided to go down here in order to see the Statue of Liberty. I'd done the whole touristy thing of walking to the torch (now not allowed) when I was like 7, and while I don't really want to do that again, I really appreciate how great a symbol that green girl is. I think it's a symbol of immigration that is unfortunately no longer really present in the American consciousness. I might take the ferry to Staten Island sometime to get a better view cause it's pretty hard to see from Manhattan.

We walked back up to Wall Street. Despite being another symbol of New York, this area really reminded me of Boston. (That picture on the right of a waterfront restaurant seems very New England too.) The crammed office buildings, the way the subway entrances meld into the surroundings and the remnants of colonial architecture all made me wonder whether I had accidentally teleported to Government Center. Also near Wall Street is a giant metal statue of a large bull, the symbol of reckless capitalism. Evidently, Wall Street planners decided against building a corresponding bear, although if I ever have the capital to buy real estate in that area (some of the most expensive land in the world) I think I'd open an FAO Schwartz and plant a giant Teddy Bear staring at the bull. Btw, the bull has gigantic balls and many tourists were making lewd poses involving them.


Ok so that leads me to a theme that I've been thinking about for a while and the title of this blog post: Tourism in America. Basically I've been a tourist on and off for most of the existence of this blog. Any time you live somewhere you don't know too well and have the curiosity to know more about it, you can be a tourist - you don't need to be wearing a giant Canon around your neck or spend half your time squinting at a map. Since I returned to the U.S. in December, I haven't left the country, but I've realized that my perspective has changed and that I see everything in my own country differently now. After observing the practices within foreign nations, I'm trying to be very aware of cultural ramifications within our everyday actions. I've noticed how quickly Americans adapt to new technology, how resistant we are to physical contact with strangers and how impatient we are. When I'm in an elevator now and someone presses a button to a floor in my way, I get legitimately peeved!

So I think it was a Sunday in March at the beginning of Spring Break when I was out exploring DC. Seeing more of the city was one of my main goals for the semester and while I probably saw more of it in that 1 semester than I had in the first 4, it was still a failure. But that Sunday I walked through Eastern Market into the Capital and whatnot and I realized that I don't think I had ever been that close to the Capital before. I had never taken a tour of it (or the White House), not with Georgetown or in high school or with my family. I had played Ultimate by the Monument but hadn't been up close to this gigantic iconic building. Nonetheless, I felt that I was very familiar with it because it had probably been in my consciousness for most of my life. Its on schoolbooks, money, posters and the backdrop of most presidential addresses. I was staring at it throughout the whole inauguration but was too far away to see the details. So on this Sunday, very few tourists were around and I was right up next to the building, and it dawned on me how amazing it was. I thought back to Europe and how impressed I was with many of the buildings there. And yes those buildings are older and connected to great history and built by cultures that really valued art. I remember being particularly impressed with the Reichstag, the German house of Parliament that had housed Kaisers, then Hitler and then redone upon unification by Norman Foster and remade into a great building with modern and baroque themes. Its a very nice building. And it doesn't even compare to the U.S. Capitol. That building is stunningly immense, a very well-crafted and not overstated testament to American values. It's all white and not too fancy, which I think represents a lot about our country. It's a stately society that spun off from Europe and while we can't recreate the long history and master artistry here, we can create a new powerful style that spins off from the old and instead of nostalgically gazing back to the past, steadily looks to the future. At least that's what I got out of it. The Capitol houses the leaders of America and thus the leaders of the free world, so it better be fucking impressive.

Its amazing how much we take for granted in our country. I actually first noticed this in Europe when I see Europeans walking by their awesome monuments not giving the slightest care and I'm just like how can they not be so proud of this place? But when home is home, everything is going to appear ordinary.

I got a better perspective on this over Easter Break, when I met up with Ilana and Clarisse, two French girls who were studying abroad at Georgetown, in Boston. We walked around Charles Street, Back Bay, the river and went up to the Prud and whatnot. Its a pretty standard bumming around day in Boston, but for them they thought it was "supercool." I strained to see how this streets and sights could impress when compared with the places they saw in Europe and came to the conclusions I expressed above.

So its very strange now going through New York and even though I have the same desire to see cool things, I feel as if the game is very different. I don't remotely stand out here, not with my dress, appearance or accent. I don't have difficulty following the laws, hailing a cab or walking the streets or whatnot, but yet I'm still completely unfamiliar with the terrain.