Gotham City

Wow, yet another new continent and there's no better place to start than in Gotham. It is always surreal to be in the States. You feel like you have to pinch yourself as while the culture is wholly familiar, thanks to Hollywood, it's always strange to feel like you are walking through a real-world set. An 'intermission' in NYC was not part of the original plan for three reasons; firstly it's on the wrong side of the continent to where I want to start biking, secondly a little luxury and some family could derail the rest of the trip for all the obvious reasons and finally, because the longer I wait to bike the Rockies the more likely I will encounter road closures due to the snow that starts to fall in late September. Thus, I always intended to save New York until the end of my 'excellent adventure'. When moving freely in one dimension having to hop back into the other is a little bit of a shock to the system. Needless to say, it was fantastic to see my brother Barry, his wife Pilu and my three year old niece, Sofia, who is away with the fairies. Mom 'n' pops flew in too making the whole thing a real family affair and as big a treat for me as pumpkin pie. We were too big a crew for the downtown appart so we spent most of the time in Barry and Pilu's pretty country home on the NY, CT and MA border in a beautiful part of the Lower Berkshires.

Naturally, I still managed to spend a few days in the city wandering around and taking it all in again. I found it very daunting to be back in a money-centre once more. The velocity of money and its importance forced me to try and extrapolate my future from my current status as a vagabond. I quickly stopped when I realised the massive gulf between me and Manhattanites but I was amazed at how much my head throbbed with thoughts of dollars while I was there. Money is very much a part of the atmosphere in New York. Such cities thrive on the salaries of bankers, insurers and lawyers. Their good or bad fortune determines the vibe of the city's eateries and shops. Manhattan ebbs and flows on the economic tides and no matter how bad things might be for some people there is still a huge amount of wealth left-over. It is very easy to get priced out of the city so as soon as the game is up, you more or less go out a revolving door waving goodbye as if losing out on a quiz show. There is always someone else prepared to try his luck. This means that while prices may move downwards due to the vagaries of supply and demand, the overall cost of living is so high that only the very wealthy can afford to stay. This is one of the reasons why I find cities so provocative. There is always a hub to a city that the prosperous maintain to a very high degree. However, the amount of have-nots that is required to support the haves is huge and so forming one's impression of NYC based on Manhattan is misleading.

I still have a strong impression of my first trip to Manhattan fifteen years ago. Being younger then, I was a little taken aback by the amount of homeless. The flickering flames from steel drums with anonymous faces rubbing their hands for warmth was straight out of the flicks. Today, however, there is very little evidence of the homeless in Manhattan. Somehow Giuliani managed to sweep them down the sewers into the sort of underworld that exists only in 'Batman Begins'. The reality is that all of society's social ills are at their most pronounced in cities. A city without a drug problem, without a homeless community and without both the rich and poor is something out of the 'Truman Show'. Obviously, New York in its totality is just like any other city but it is possible for the prosperous and tourists in Manhattan to lose touch with reality. No matter how much tax one pays is it right to marginalise the have-nots to the sidelines? Levying them with transport costs only acts as a further method of exclusion. Is it fair to promote a policy of out of sight therefore out of mind? Is there not a consequence for society in having people isolated in their own web of thought; the rich fraternise with the rich, the middle class aspire with the middle class, and the working class struggle among themselves. Living in such segmented communities only serves to reinforce the belief system of each. This belief system regenerates in the young who are never given a choice as to what socio-economic group they are born into. In the land of the free, every man supposedly has opportunity if he is prepared to work hard enough. The irony as I see is that capitalist values are exhausting for all those who work, be they rich or poor. Why would anybody want to be tired all the time?

If there was a trophy for the country that provides the biggest culture shock then it would come down to a shoot-out between India and America. I know this sounds strange to a lot of people who consider America familiar, however, I have been here plenty of times and it still never fails to make me wonder. Consider what a Punjabi, who has known nothing but the smells and sounds of India, might make of America? Likewise what would a gas-guzzling do-nut munching Yankee make of a street scene in India? I find the extremes of the States very interesting and so I look forward to trying to unlock the secret of the American Dream as only Cobb could.

Sweet daydreams

Marco

swapping the hustle for the tranquility of the country