Goodbye to the Big Apple

So today was our last day in New York City, in our fourth story walk-up on Ninth Avenue, right in the loud, flashy and always active core of Hell's Kitchen (for our non-New Yorkers that's the neighborhood west of Time Square with tons of great restaurants and crappy off Broadway plays.) Almost a year and a half ago we arrive two recent graduates, one with a high-scale consulting job and one wondering if he'd have to shelve his communications degree and go back to waiting tables, seriously I was applying to major corporations and the corner bistro in the same day!

19-months later I'm an experience Advertising Operations Manager (I'm the one the programs those annoying ads that follow you around on the internet and smartphone, let the hate mail flow!), who spends weekdays working in the cool shadow of the Empire State Building, summer weekends lunching in Central Park and winter nights hanging out in warm Korean ramen restaurants in K-Town.

What am I going to miss that only New York can offer? So many things you can never find anywhere else. You only have to wander off the tourist-saturated avenues, out to the west and east sides of the city where only Manhattanites dwell, these fashionable creatures who wear over-sized sunglasses, designer cloths yet swear and drink like sailors, gossip like the girls on Sex and City and believe they are as politically savvy as the diplomats over at the UN building.

Fine, I'll stop painting this elaborate picture of this rare species and start listing what I am going to miss and will be trying to find in Singapore everyday I'm there.

1. Watching big, strong and obviously uncomfortable straight guys walking their girlfriends small, tea-cup sized dogs... with no girlfriends around.
2. Hobos on the subway who wear only blankets... only blankets!
3. An old man, dressed in a bikini, with a foam statue of liberty hat, walking passed unmoved but amused cops. Seriously look!
4. A yoga studio on every corner... only matched by a Starbucks and doggy daycares every 20-feet.
5. Roller disco in walkways of Central Park.
6. Medically trained, Jewish ordained, dermatologists who advertise only on the subway.
7. Discovering your ability to parkour when trying to catch a taxi with grocery bags.
8. Rats who are more vicious and aggressive than military train dogs.
9. Tattoo parlors below psychics, offering two-for-one discount deals.
10. Paying insane prices for mac & cheese or fish tacos (tuna on tortilla chips).

Oh, there are a million other things, my favorite whiskey bar, the Big Apple Meat Market with its nearly expired discount steaks, MOMA with its questionable "art exhibits" of contemporary art/porn collections, even the clouds of pigeons that every person loves to set off when they dine on stale bread at any intersection.

But now it's Singapore where I'm going to have hundreds of new things to learn to love, find with bemused annoyance and big huffs of exasperation.