nyc experiment: week ten

Because we are going to be visiting our daughter in Europe for a week, we are down to just 8 days left of living in New York. Being close to the end of this 90 days is making me think about how much we have experienced since we have been here. On arrival, I refused to unpack because I was uncertain about the apartment and I was feeling panicked and overwhelmed. This week, we visited our son in Boston for his last home games of his college water polo career and on our return, my husband said that he was looking forward to getting back to the West Village because it was really starting to feel like home. If you are in CA and starting to panic that we are never coming home – don’t. We are definitely coming home. We miss our friends, family, dogs, cooking for ourselves in a “real” kitchen, sleeping with a window open, controlling our indoor temperature and completing a load of laundry in under 6 hours.

As we consider our re-entry into suburban life, we are certain that we will absolutely miss walking around the city. Let’s be real, we will be back in our cars in a hot second and our post dinner walks will disappear. But, for the last 10 weeks, walking has been a huge part of this experience. Yesterday, I walked to my hair appointment which was about a mile each way. Last Friday, I walked from our apartment to SoHo and then continued on through Little Italy before meeting friends for dinner in Chinatown. We have walked up and down the Hudson River Walk from Tribeca to Chelsea from the West Village to the 9/11 Memorial. We walked from the Village through Washington Square Park, up 5th Avenue to Herald Square. I walked from The Met through Central Park to the Upper West Side and then down to Lincoln Center. After taking live Peloton classes, we walked the entire length of the High Line, from Hudson Yards to the Meatpacking District and then back to the West Village. When I get home and resume walking my dogs five days a week, I will miss walking along a river, seeing complex fashion choices but also enjoy not worrying about being run over by an electric bike or stepping in dog poop.

We have already booked our remaining workouts at Barry’s and Liftonic. While walking to Barry’s on Monday morning, I suggested to my husband that we do our last Barry’s classes at different locations. I knew this would not be received well because it took me two weeks to get him to deviate from “the plan” and change our Monday workout to 8:30 am from 9:40 am to avoid a particularly aggressive instructor. As predicted, his initial reaction was to make a case for staying with the established pattern. ** He fears a change because it could initiate a full breakdown in workout structure – true enneagram 6.  I explained that there was a possibility we could leave having spent three months at the worst Barry’s in the downtown Barry’s triangle and there was a part of me that needed to know what the other locations had to offer. Fortunately, last night we had dinner with someone my husband knows through work who also lives in the West Village and attends Barry’s Bootcamp. He ranked the three locations that are equidistant from our apartment: #1 NoHo (newest and largest) #2 our Chelsea location and #3 Tribeca. I knew that this third party opinion would be the nudge my husband needed to add variety to our workout plan and I am happy to report that I will be checking out Barry’s NoHo next week. 

During week 10, I saw “Almost Famous” on Broadway, the fourth of five shows we will have seen during our stay. LIke the three other performances we have seen, “The Piano Lesson,” “Six” and “The Kite Runner,” I mostly enjoyed each show but did not love any of them. I have loved only a few shows including “Hamilton,” “Come from Away,” “Avenue Q,” “In the Heights” and “Dear Evan Hansen.” Many of the other shows I have seen leave me fairly bored in the second act, counting the remaining scenes and/or songs until I can leave the theater. The shows I barely tolerated include Tony winners like “Hadestown,” “Chicago”, “Cats”, “Phantom” and “The Band’s Visit.” I am admitting this because I need to be much more discerning about attending plays. Despite being a Broadway skeptic, we have tickets to see “&Juliet” this week and I am very optimistic that I will love it.

I want to circle back on the hair appointment that I mentioned earlier. The NY hair appointment was the second day I was here and I was so nervous about getting there that I took an Uber so I wouldn’t be late or get lost. I was able to calm down by the end of that appointment and took my first subway ride alone to get home. The hairdresser was recommended by a friend of a friend who I have never met. I am on a pretty frequent hair color schedule and my plan was to just do color while here and wait until going home to get a haircut. My new New York stylist, Avi. is Israeli, looks exactly like a grown up version of my friend Karen’s son and has very strong opinions about my hair and how it should be managed. I let his enthusiasm and my inexplicable feeling that we could somehow be related sway me into booking a haircut. I had to know if Avi had some NYC scissor magic that could transform my baby fine hair into something stylish. I left the salon feeling good about the haircut but I have yet to wash & style it myself so I don’t know yet if the cut is as good as I hoped it would be. (*Kent – if you are reading this, I’ll see you Tuesday, November 29 and we will pick up right where we left off!)

Week 10 ended with “fall back” time change, darkness at 5:15 pm, an exceptionally warm weekend (in the 70’s) that quickly turned into the coldest evening we have had since arriving (in the 40’s). Then, it was so warm on Monday that I air dried jeans and a sweatshirt and they dried quicker than the rest of the load in the dryer. On Tuesday, the weather whiplash continued – it dropped 20 degrees and I needed the Super to show me how to open the valves on the radiators because I was wearing my parka in the apartment all day.

I am starting to think about packing things up and offering our Wayfair furniture and dorm accessories to our friends who live here. But, mostly I am thinking about how to take what we like about living in this magical city and incorporate some tiny piece back into our Bay Area lifestyle.