14 Recommendations for Visiting New York City

This was originally going to be another "Things We Have Learned Since Moving to NYC" post, but I decided to go a different way with it this time. Not only do we have lots of teams coming to the city to serve, we have also had a number of visitors, who either specifically came to see us, or who came to the city with a tour or for business and we meet up with them for lunch or something. We have some recommendations for what to do and not do, to see and not see for all of them.

The Freedom Tower
at twilight

1. Don't bother with Times Square. It's a glorified intersection. Everything is purely for tourists and is wildly overpriced. Native New Yorkers avoid the area like it's got bed bugs. If you've never been to the city before, go ahead and take a look around, but be forewarned.
2. Do see the World Trade Center. You can pay to go up the tower or just walk around the Memorial, which is free. Either way, it is definitely worth it.
3. Don't freak out about taking the subway. You won't get mugged, you won't contract cholera. You might get lost, though, if you don't follow the directions we give you or pay attention to the signs. Always pay attention to the signs.
4. Also concerning the subway: Riding 30 or 45 minutes on the subway is nothing. It's an easy trip. Some people feel bad for us when we say it takes that long to get downtown from our apartment. Really, it's no big deal at all.
5. Be prepared to walk. Possibly quite a lot. Wear good shoes.
6. Be prepared to take stairs. Especially if you take the subway

   

   Kids love the subway

   anywhere. Sometimes to get down to the platform from street level you must descend 4, 5, or 6 flights.
7. When out and about, carry a couple of granola bars with you to give to the homeless or anyone you encounter who asks for money or help. It's an easy way to contribute.
8. If you're driving in, practice your parallel parking beforehand.
9. Don't be shy about asking questions or speaking to people in public. Long gone are the days of "Don't look a New Yorker in the eye." The vast majority of New Yorkers will be happy to help you if they can.
10. Try your best to see something outside of Manhattan. Yes, there are lots of cool things to see and do there, but the outer boroughs (and even way uptown Manhattan) is what we  call "real New York," where most of the people live. Brooklyn is the trendiest, Queens is the most diverse, the Bronx has some major attractions, and Staten Island is also there. (We're partial to the Bronx, of course.)
11. Central Park is a big park. It's got trees and grass. Sure, it's pretty, but at the end of the day, it's just a park. We chuckle a bit when our friends from rural and suburban Pennsylvania want to see Central Park, because where they live is easily as beautiful as anything Central Park can offer.
12. Travel tip: "Uptown" generally means north, "Downtown" generally

    

    Read the signs!

    means south. The Bronx, though is above uptown. Avenues run north/south and numbered streets run east/west (more or less).
13. New York City ain't cheap. Want to see a Broadway show, go to the Statue of Liberty, look out the top of One World Trade Center? All good things. You're looking at $40 per person at least for each one of those things, and very likely a lot more. Fancy restaurant? Hundred bucks, easy. And it all adds up even more quickly if you've got a family.
14. Perhaps above all: Come to terms with the fact that you will not be able to do everything you'd like to do. The city is just too big and too awesome. We've lived here now over a year and a half, and we've barely scratched the surface of what there is to see and do.

The above list contains some best practices. However, if you come visit us and simply must see Times Square and cannot live without strolling through Central Park, then we'll be happy to oblige. People are far more important than sights and landmarks.

Oh, and if you stay with us, there's a good chance you'll be sleeping on the couch. :) 

One Year and Counting

Bethany kept asking me why I needed to know where the birthday candles were. I avoided giving her a straight answer.

Dinner that night wasn't fancy, just take-and-bake pizza and salad. We would be leaving for a 5-day Lancaster-Pittsburgh trip in a couple of days, and we didn't want a lot of leftovers in the fridge.

I found the candles in a bag of party supplies in the top of the pantry, took out 5 candles, and put one each in the 5 slices of pizza waiting on the table to be eaten. Then I lit 4 of them -- Juliet cannot yet be trusted not to respect the destructive power of the simple birthday candle flame.

Today is exactly one year since we moved to New York City, I told them. We made it a year! Then I prayed a commemorative prayer before our simple meal and we all blew out our candles. Bethany then lit Juliet's so she wouldn't feel left out, and -- with her mommy's help -- she kindasorta blew out her candle.

Then Ginny said, "Can we celebrate the anniversary every year by having pizza?" I thought that was a splendid idea. 

We then each said something we'd learned in the past year. Ginny said that we walk a lot more than drive in the van. That's true, we do. Cora said that there are ice cream trucks everywhere, sidewalks, big buildings, and dog poop. Yep, that's true too. Bethany said that it can be hard to make friends at the beginning, but once you get to know some people you see how nice they are. 

As for Juliet, she's learned lots of words, learned how to climb up and take all the diaper wipes out of the package, and gotten much better at taking the stairs.

I can't begin to list all the things I've learned over the past year. You can read some of them here, here, and here. I won't make another list today, though I probably could. Mainly, though, I continue to learn how dependent I am on God for everything, from the floor underneath my feet to the coffee in my cup to the words in my mouth when I meet yet another man who is homeless to the family I share this cramped apartment with.

I also know how much I have to learn. That list would be quite extensive as well.

A year is a milestone, and no small one at that. I can relate personally to each of the items listed in the link below, and can give examples from my own experience for many of them:

Big Appled: 14 Things I Learned During My First Year in New York 

So here's to the next year, and the one after that. And to seeing more every day of what God is doing in this city and in us.

Here's to many more years!

13 More Things We've Learned Since Moving to NYC: 8-Month Anniversary Edition

1. Don’t leave stuff in the lobby of your building (like a stroller), even if you plan to come down and get it in an hour or two, or else it will undoubtedly be gone when you return. [Author’s Note: Someone had taken our stroller and put it down with the trash cans, so there was no harm done.]
2. Snow makes the streets shrink. Piled snow prevents cars from parking right next to the curb, so where two moving cars could previously squeeze past one another, now only one car can drive at a time.
3. A corollary to #2: Snow takes up perfectly good parking places. More than once I drove right by a wide-open space because I knew that I’d have a heck of a time getting back out again.
4. In the midst of a bitterly cold winter, if the temperature rises at all out of the 20s, it feels as though everyone comes outside.



The frozen Harlem River

5. Leave plenty of time for doctor’s appointments. Yes, we can walk to their offices, but the sheer number of people in the city and the demand for medical services mean that no appointment ever happens when it is scheduled. Ever.
6. Simply being made in New York City doesn’t mean that the pizza is any good. Some of it is pretty lousy, in fact.
7. Don’t park over manhole covers during winter or early spring. Apparently the salt they use on the roads has been known to seep underground and eat away at underground wiring and – I kid you not – the manholes can explode. Check out this video: https://youtu.be/I8go5G3-J5g
8. Leave your windows open a little when you go out so that when you return to your apartment, you won’t be walking into what feels like a pizza oven.
9. Twitter is great for keeping up with what’s happening in New York City and our Bronx neighborhood. Just be ready for the bad news along with the good.
10. Mormons are vigilant in our area. We’ve had at least four pairs knock on our door since we moved here.
11. Perceptions vary: To some people our neighborhood (Bedford Park) is a nice, quiet one; others, however, have described where we live and where the Priority 1 apartment is located as “the hood.”
12. Melting snow is a blessing and a curse. It’s great that there’s more than just a narrow pathway to traverse, but every pedestrian ramp turns into a sludge-filled puddle, and all of the trash and dog poop that had collected (and been preserved) in snow banks now reappears as a disgusting obstacle course on everywhere you turn.
13. We live in a predominantly Hispanic area (and of that, the majority are Dominican), and as such, our girls get called “mami,” Bethany gets “mamma” or “mami,” and Greg has heard “boss” several times. All of these are familiar, friendly terms.

17 More Things We've Learned Since Moving to New York City

1. We’ll have to get used to going food shopping once a week or more. Our fridge/freezer and pantry are simply not big enough to hold much more than that.
2. If you do have to go to the store (an Aldi just opened ten minutes away!), go when you have to move your car anyway for the street sweeper.
3. Make sure you carefully read posted parking signs. Pay particular attention to start and end times, if there are any. Failing to do this may cost you sixty bucks.
4. Public schools (and street sweepers) in New York City observe all kinds of holidays. Students had two days off for Rosh Hashanah a couple of weeks ago. (Ginny’s Christian school was, however, still in session.)
5. Just because you live within yards of dozens of people doesn’t mean that you’ll see them very much, if at all. Walking back from the bus stop last week Ginny and I met a woman and her two kids who live on the 5^th floor. In two months I’d seen the son once or twice, but never the mom.
6. Be prepared for the cost of your car insurance to triple. Yes, TRIPLE.

   

   Friends from PA--a family of 

   6--visited one weekend

7. Finding a church that preaches the Bible is non-negotiable. The weekly smacks in the face are necessary.
8. If you choose not to put your 4 year-old in Pre-K, be prepared that there will be NO other kids her age at story time in the library, because pretty much all the 4 year-olds in the City are in Pre-K.
9. It is indeed possible to fit an additional family of 6 into your already tight 3-bedroom apartment. For one night, at least.
10. Doing laundry at the laundromat will get easier each time.
11. Setting up life in a new place takes time. More than two months here, and we’re still working on car insurance, setting up doctors, registering our van, getting new driver’s licenses, and figuring out where to put stuff in our apartment.
12. Having so much in walking distance from your house is awesome. Here’s a partial list of what we can walk to: bank, pharmacy, doctors for all five of us, post office, parks and playgrounds, coffee shops, Chinese restaurant, pizza places, numerous restaurants, several big stores, and probably hundreds of smaller shops.
13. We discovered, quite accidentally, that we can go out onto the roof of our building. There’s not much up there but satellite dishes and exhaust pipes, and the view isn’t as spectacular as I had hoped – I was holding out hope that we could at least see the Manhattan skyline, but alas – but it was still pretty neat to be up there.
14. Phone calls, texts, emails, Skype and Facetime sessions, and visits from friends and family are wonderful encouragements. (To be fair, we already knew this, but it bears repeating.) 
15. October is a wonderful month for parking. They suspend the street sweeping on 8 days this month, and if you play it right, you can leave your car in the same place for almost three weeks!
16. Prayer is vital to, well, everything. Big and small, “spiritual” and “ordinary.” We knew this as well, of course, but we are repeatedly reminded of it.
17. Even though our home is significantly smaller than our previous one, we still manage to lose things. Currently, we have misplaced one of our cell phone chargers.

    

    Sunset view from the rooftop of our building

19 Things We Have Learned Since Moving to New York City

Briggs Ave

1. Don’t trust reservations on rental truck websites. They have a vastly different definition of the word “reservation” than does the rest of the English speaking world. http://youtu.be/WKpt2E2Lqcw
2. People who help you load an 18-foot truck, drive 5 hours to a different state, and unload an 18-foot truck up to the 4^th floor are really amazing people. http://youtu.be/0siRMEEY8rc
3. Your four year-old just may decide to throw up in the back of the van right as you cross the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, where there is absoLUTEly no place to pull over and tend to her.
4. Despite your extensive downsizing efforts, you will still have too much stuff and will still be trying to figure out where to put everything (“Well, I guess we can just keep that in Juliet’s room…”).
5. Do your best, when moving in, to put the rugs down before you bring all your furniture, boxes, and tubs in. I REALLY wish I had understood how vital this principle is.
6. Just because there are plenty of parking places on your street at noon, there may not be a single one when you try to come back to your apartment building at 9pm on a weeknight. http://youtu.be/egsdc7tZ_xc
7. Apparently New Yorkers believe their city has no bugs, and so screens do not come standard issue in your basic apartment window. [Author’s note: New York City does indeed have bugs. Ask mosquito-magnet Bethany.]
8. There is also no requirement to provide a phone jack.
9. Everything looks significantly different when you walk around than when you drive around.
10. The seemingly random emotional breakdowns your young daughters have about meaningless things (a potato chip that breaks, for example) just may be the result of being psychologically drained by a major life-change, even though they are unable to understand that.
11. Your four year-old may have believed for the last two years that the place identified by the words “New York” is no more than the Priority 1 apartment where we host teams. Correcting this misconception may prove difficult.
12. We absolutely should work hard at learning Spanish.
13. Hot water from a boiler is REALLY hot.
14. The ice cream truck may come by as late as 9:30pm.
15. Someone a couple of buildings over greatly enjoys his Spanish pop music. And he desires that entire neighborhood enjoy it as well. At midnight.
16. The Chinese place half-a-block away isn’t half bad. Prices are comparable too. http://youtu.be/E1OvVKAga2k [I couldn’t resist linking to this scene :]
17. A 2-liter soda costs $2.25 at the market half-a-block away. A gallon of milk is $3.50.
18. The fact that water – including the hot water – and trash and recycling removal are included in the rent makes us feel a tiny bit better about how high our monthly payment is. A VERY tiny bit.
19. Moving from medium-town Pennsylvania to the Bronx, NY can have a similar psychological effect to moving from the US to China, as we did in 2003. Overwhelmed, a little helpless, surrounded by people yet lonesome, excited to see and try new things yet wondering if you have done the right thing. In other words: culture shock.

These are merely a few of our initial observations; stories with more depth and detail will follow. We’re still figuring things out, learning our way around. It will take some time. But we are excited to be here and have to pinch ourselves occasionally that everything around us is actually real.

And as you may have divined, we’re Seinfeld fans. One day we’ll go to the actual café that was featured on the show. It’s down on Broadway and 112^th.