The Big Apple - In pictures

The view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge.











Brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn.











Old El Paso it ain't: authentic Mexican eats at the Pacifico, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.





















Meet me down by the docks. Red Hook, Brooklyn.









Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn

Every Canadian that travels in the US has their own list of the little things that most catch their attention upon arrival. Having to order "hot tea", the money all looking the same, lack of bilingual packaging; I'm always impressed by the wide array of new-fangled, state of the art innovations in snack and convenience food that greets you at every corner store. Like, corn-chip cones filled with chocolate and peanut butter? That one hasn't made it north of the border yet.

Deane and I arrived wide-eyed and tired through a post rush-hour traffic jam to Alexis' Brooklyn digs. What she pays for a postage-stamp of a room in an apartment shared with two other people, charmingly located between two highways and the docks could get you a swank one-bedroom place all to yourself in the hippest part of Montreal. Ouch. Welcome to New York. Maybe they call it the city that never sleeps because it's so expensive you had to pawn your bed in order to make rent.

This was our home base for a weekend that involved much wandering around, the wanderings broken up with people-watching from inside warm cafés, and ample amounts of beer and food. Anti-tourism: the best way to really see what a place is all about.

Brooklyn is absolutely huge, densely populated, and encompasses several widely-varying neighbourhoods. You have downtown Brooklyn, with skyscrapers and banks; Williamsburg, the formerly run-down newly-gentrifying hipster capital of the world; gritty industrial-adjacent Red Hook and Bushwick, crack-den central. Prospect Park and Carroll Gardens have a well-cultured yuppie thing going on that recalled Montreal's Plateau. Ample territory for aimless loitering, despite the the unseasonably cold temperatures.

In the more well-off parts of Brooklyn, it's all about babies and dogs, it seems. Tons of young, couples with bumps or babies, ( or both), and that lacking, a couple of dogs in tow. Many establishments allow dogs, and those that didn't felt the need to preface their storefront sign stating " No dogs allowed in the store" with a " We love them, but..."

Another trend I observed was a maté boom. Imagine me, fresh off the boat from Argentina, maté central, and I get to Brooklyn to find several cafés offering "Maté Lattes" and cosmetics stores hawking maté face products. I guess in the same way green tea boomed a couple of years ago, and now can be found in every café and face cleanser maté's the next new readily available pseudo-healthy ingredient that ups the natural-ness quotient of whatever it's put into. You heard it here first, folks.

In general the same leisurely weekend rhythm of late brunches, afternoon walks and browsing small shops for books, CDs and neat clothes pervades, in a manner eerily similar to the way it pervades life in downtown Montreal. But with a New York twist, of course.

The Big Apple - In Words

A friend of mine once met Ralph Benmergi, CanCon TV semi-star. She said she was really surprised at how short he was in person. Without really realizing it, she'd formed an idea of what he was really like from what she had seen on-screen. And though I hate to draw any kind of parallel between the city of New York and a has-been 90's TV host, it's sort of the same deal when you visit NYC for the first time.

The images, place names, personality and of the Big Apple are onmipresent in North American pop culture, from the Jazz Age to Sex and the City. So you have a strong idea of what you're going to encounter before you go. Actually it's usually because of the pre-conceived ideas of what NYC is all about that you decide that it's somewhere you just have to visit in the first place. Don't many people want to see Broadway, Time Square and the Statue of Liberty at least once in their lives?

There were no disappointingly unmet expectations during my introduction to New York City this past weekend. But because we stayed and spent most of our time in the borough of Brooklyn, as opposed to Manhattan, it was kind of like getting invited to Michael Jackson's for a family barbeque, and ending up spending most of your time drinking beer and chatting with Janet. Brooklyn's the down-to-earth, less glamourous but still famous in its own right younger sibling to glitzy, frenetic, centre-of-the-world Manhattan.

But New York's New York, and my short time there only deepened my fascination and made crystal clear the necessity of a second visit to really get to know this absolutely humungous city.