For lack of other things to write about this week, time for some more observations on our transition to New York City. There are still a few gaps in the coverage I’ve written about so far, but expect this to be another fairly short one. Maybe next week I’ll have a better topic.
We have reached the middle of Spring at this point, and the weather has gotten nice and warm, which has been very welcome after one of the harsher winters I’ve ever had to live through. If you talk to people who have lived here a while, you find a lot of them will joke that every winter they are so miserable that they want to move, but the rest of the year is so nice that they forget just how miserable it was, so it’s a constant cycle of peaks and valleys. I really only experienced half of the winter here, but I can definitely see how people get that way.
In terms of how the weather here compares to Seattle, there are two things that surprised me. One thing I knew before getting here is that the weather reaches more extremes, but that’s not unusual given that Seattle is known for being temperate. Everywhere is more extreme than Seattle. But the first thing I didn’t expect is that the weather here swings more wildly day to day. The temperature and precipitation in Seattle have a smoothness to them that makes it easy to predict what today will be like based on the last couple days. NYC is not like that at all, I really have to look at the forecast to get an idea of what to expect since it could be sunny and 75, or cloudy and 50, and who the heck knows when rain will come pouring through. But that leads to the second surprise. The weather forecasts here are way more accurate than what I’m used to from the west coast. When the forecast says it will rain for a couple hours, it actually rains for those couple hours and then it’s gone. People who have lived here a while will tell me that the weather forecast is always wrong, but coming from Seattle, I can’t believe how accurate it is.
Also with the coming of nicer weather, that inevitably leads people to want to go outside and hang out more. Biking is a common way of getting around, and it’s likely I will be doing that again for the first time in almost two decades. I’m sure I’ll have a separate post about that. But otherwise, I am realizing just how big a difference it makes when you live in a city with great public transit. I’ve mentioned already in the last couple NYC posts about how much I like it, but it’s worth a little more time since it’s fundamentally the biggest difference for me in my daily life.
It is easy to say that without the subway, NYC would basically cease to function. It is hard to conceptualize just how many people use it at all hours of every day, even when you see how crowded every train and every platform is during rush hour, but it is a lot of people. Without the trains, you are left with cars and buses, and there is simply no way the roads could accommodate the volume. And that is just the subway we’re talking about, that doesn’t include the amount of people who come into the city from the nearby region using the LIRR, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, PATH, and Amtrak trains.
I heavily rely on the subway, it’s how I get to work every day. We also use it pretty frequently when we want to meet up with friends. It’s so liberating to be in a situation where you and some friends can get brunch together at a place two miles away, and it’s no big deal. It’s something we haven’t really been able to do since we lived on Capitol Hill with all our Seattle friends in the same area, and it worked there because we could walk. It’s the same thing here, but the distances are greater, yet still just as easy. I love that our friend group in Queens can randomly decide to get together during the week and we can just make it happen. This is not to say that never happened in Seattle, getting a drink after work with co-workers happened once in a while. The frequency is just a lot higher now.
I don’t really have anything else to add at this point. As I said, it’s a short one. But I will end by saying that nearly four months in, NYC is finally feeling like home rather than just a long work trip or vacation. For better or worse, we’ve fallen into a consistent routine and we’ve established our favorite food spots in the area. There is certainly a lot more exploring and experiencing to do, and there’s a whole 4-5 months of nice weather coming up in which to do that. So there will definitely be more observations in the future.