New York: More Romantic and Less Accelerated

I remembered New York as a noisy and fast-paced city, but when I arrived, I found a rather romantic city. Yet, since I was traveling by myself, I had to share Big Apple’s romanticism with myself.


In this occasion I chose to leave aside museums and stunning Broadway shows to enjoy New York in open air.


I strolled down Fifth Avenue while I window shopped in some of NY’s most famous shops, I entertained myself observing diverse and unique individuals, and relaxed walking across the SOHO, China Town, Little Italy and The Village.


At the SOHO and Little Italy I got inspired by paying attention to the decoration of all the petit restaurants and small stores that offered varied, fun, different and ordinary artifacts.


I got momentarily accelerated as I went through Wall Street, the world’s financial center, seeing how business people ran across the street to avoid loosing precious seconds of their valuable time.


I freed myself walking along the shore of the Hudson River while I watched how the tourists’ boats set sail towards the Statue of Liberty.


I was left gasping in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge, an architectonic wonder with an unmatchable view of New York City, where I ran into one of my graduate professors from Spain; a wonderful surprise worthy of my surrealistic life.


I enjoyed myself with ChinaTown’s baubles and got transported to some forgotten corner of Paris or Madrid as I walked down The Village; an area of low houses built very close together in an area of NY that was unknown to me until then.


In Central Park I fell in love with life as I admired trees painted with autumn and joyful skirls that jumped from one tree branch to the other.


It was a short, but incredible trip. It lacked museums, culture and extravaganza, but it was filled with the beauty of simplicity.


It was the trip where I discovered it is possible to enjoy romance without company.

Cómo llegar desde DC:
http://www.vamoosebus.com/
Bus diario de NY a DC y viceversa

Bogota, Colombia, It's like New York on Crack-Cocaine

This time, it is the turn of one of my other foreign correspondents from Colombia: Manuel Camacho.

Enjoy the ride through Bogota, Colombia with Manuel:

The city of Bogota itself is a pretty awesome place to live in. Chaotic, super urban, fast-paced. It's like New York on crack-cocaine, with BMW's riding alongside horse-drawn carriages, graffiti art on the city walls waging war on fascism, very polite pedestrians (road-raged killers behind the wheel), and vallenato and salsa music everywhere.

In between the cracks of the concrete jungle, I've had the pleasure of infusing the increasingly present bass pounding of a growing hip hop movement, not to mention the quality of Colombian home-grown trip-hop, downbeat, tropi-pop, punk rock and reggae.

Public transport here is quite the experience. Imagine an army of bumper cars from the 1950's, racing all over the city. No bus-stops. You basically tell the guy where you want to get off, given he actually slows down enough for you to successfully ninja jump out of the bus onto a clear patch of sidewalk.

This is because there is always a bus or two behind you trying to get ahead, if they get ahead, they take more fares because they are first in line; the more fares the more the drivers get paid at the end of the day, even if it’s at the cost of mass transit casualties.

Occasionally though, you get storytellers and poets on these buses looking for some change in exchange for their artistic services. They liven up the ride for just 5 American cents.

Apart from this, the characters and personalities I've met along the way are just too far out: Psychics, rouge nuns, clandestine magazine editors, kung-fu fighting rehab crack heads (literally), former guerilla and paramilitary members, a scientist probing for life outside the earth, and an Amazonian witch doctor. Yeah, it's been interesting.