EPTMostly incoherent
Since Monday is a bank holiday (Presidents' Day), I decided to come home (Waterloo) for three days instead. It just happened that it was also my mother's birthday, more reasons to come home.
I dragged my huge suitcase onto the subway train from home all the way to work, then from work all the way to the airport. The public transportation is relatively convenient for getting to JFK from Manhattan, and the air train, although not as fast as the one in Shanghai, is still pretty neat.
JFK airport is much newer, hence better than La Guardia, which is really shitty in every way. However, the staff members are just as unhelpful/rude as anywhere in the States. One big difference between Canada and US, through my observation, is that Canadians are generally much nicer, where as Americans have this holier-than-thou attitude, just because they know something better because they work there for 12 hours a day. From my perception, they think they are doing you a big favour (and you are an idiot for not knowing) instead of doing their job.
Left work at around 2, checked in luggages at around 3:40, arrived at the boarding gate at 4:00-ish after purchasing some cheap duty-free Chivas Regal. Boarding was supposed to start at 4:40 as the plane was scheduled to take off at 5:10. The crews were late, schedule pushed back to 5:30. Sat in the plane at 5:40, waiting for the plane to lift off. Random traffic till 6:00. Random paper on the ground till 6:30. More random unexplained shit till 7:00. Finally plane leaves JFK at 7:20; two hours late, great. Everything after that was relatively smooth. Got home around 10:00, the whole trip took eight hours in total. I could have driven back -_-
Wished my mom a happy birthday, and gave her a Burberry scarf I purchased from Bloomingdale's. Everyone's happy.
On the airtrain to JFK, I got a good glance at the other boroughs of N.Y.C. Conclusion? Pretty shitty.
When the plane took off, since I was sitting at a window seat, I got a good view of the city at night, and it was gorgeous. This was not the same at the destination. Toronto was much darker, and patches of bare landscape were seen everywhere.
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Stayed up really late last night because I was watching the GF of proleague, which was pretty stupid and the games were mostly disappointing. w/e.
Went to Dim Sum @ Cameron (Local Chinese restaurant) this morning, and it was as delicious as ever. I'm still having trouble finding a good dim sum place in Manhattan, and I'm about to go to Flushing in attempt to find a good Chinese brunch.
What really shocked me was how "sketchy" (for lack of a better word) people looked. People here have zero sense of fashion, that's what I realized. I really don't blame them when the nearest shoppable mall is a 30-min drive away, and it doesn't even have that many decent stores. But the food was amazing.
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Random comments...
A) Filthy.
If you have ever lived in Canada, you'd find Manhattan pretty dirty. I take the B, C, and D trains most often, and they are old and dirty and dimly lit, which reminds me of the trains in Beijing (Shanghai's trains are much better, like the 4, 5, and 6). Rats are everywhere in the station, not just in the tunnels, they actually come up and crawl on the chairs. But I guess it's very difficult to maintain something that is so old and has been used by so many people everyday.
Another thing is that people don't give a shit about
1. Littering, and
2. Recycling.
In Canada, garbage cans are everywhere, and beside each garbage can, there's almost always some sort of recycling bin as well. New York, on the other hand, has significantly less garbage cans, just like China (although I think people steal them in China). People in general don't give a rat's tail about garbage, I have seen people just tossing waste away when a garbage an is literally 2 steps away. Similar things happen in China, except there are old people who pick up the plastic bottles so they sell them for a dime (RMB) each, whereas in NY, they just sit there... Also, no one seems to recycle anything...
People are just too busy?
B) People don't give a shit about the environment.
Sort of a continuation of the section above, people in NY don't give a shit about the environment.
At work, everything is disposable - coffee cups, plates, utensils, water cups and things of similar nature. The cups are tiny, and an individual can go through about 10-15 of the aforementioned items in an average work day. That is a lot of unnecessary waste imo.
Again, people are just too busy?
C) I often find New York and China pretty similar (by China, I really mean the few cities I've lived in/been to). People don't give a flying fuck about anything, because either they are too busy (which is probably not true for China) or that there are enough people doing it so other ppl feel justified doing it as well. Also, people are pretty mean... (comparative to Canada) But sometimes I see some things that are pretty different as well (duh), such as people giving away their subway seats to elders and women. Sure, some people in China still do it, but at a much less frequent rate.
w/e...
Thanks for reading
