New York’s Critters
Feb 15th, 2010 by sophie smith
New York can be a daunting place, there’s no question about it. It’s not the same thing to visit here as it is to move to the city to live, with no exit strategy. Coming to town for a weekend and enjoying one of New York City’s boutique hotels along with a full agenda of Broadway plays and five-star restaurants is simply exquisite. It’s one of the great pleasures of contemporary culture, and you don’t have to be a globe-trotter to enjoy it. It certainly helps though, because any kind of worldly knowledge, wisdom, and experience can help to reveal the city for all it is.
It’s a great mix of everything at once, where the human race presents its daily drama in all of its secret faces. Short visits will often only reveal the best of these faces, with a kind of blinding brightness that makes the city seem manageable and always fun. Living here is another story altogether, and fun can be difficult to come by when the money is running out and there’s hardly another soul in sight to confess your loneliness to. However, if you do find yourself at the end of it all, one of the great things about the city is that is shows you inner resources you didn’t know you had. Like the time my friend and I found friendship with the rats.
It’s true. People talk about the rats all the time. They live in the sewers and the subways, and they sometimes make themselves at home in your apartment. Stories are everywhere about the rats as big as cats, and although it would be nice to know these are simply urban legends, they are certainly not. There was one evening, however, my friend and I were talking in Washington Square Park, sharing our frustrations at the city, with life in general, and felt we were among friends. The park was crawling when the darkness set in, and we realized we were surrounded. To their credit, they didn’t bite us, and seemed to listen to our tales of heartbreak and loneliness, and for a moment, we were all in this together.
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