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New York For Beginners…
It’s the winters that really get to you. Unsurprisingly. New York is known for its winter Nor’easters. Harsh blizzards with saucer-sized snowflakes, swing through blanketing everything. A silence falls on the usually frantic city as the cars crawl past so slowly they sound like cats purring. It’s actually quite beautiful in the moment, and even on the coldest of days New York can have sun in abundance. I’ve never needed sunglasses in UK winters. And snow means sledging. I’ve never seen so many plastic sledges being carried up and down the street by adults and children alike.
Another ‘good thing’ about New York City winters is that apartments are usually well heated — even overheated — because landlord can be fined a lot of money if their tenants complain about the cold. Contrastingly in Europe there’s almost a virtue in suffering the cold. And the city is pretty good at getting people off the street during the worst of it. Workers wait at the end of tube lines to direct the homeless to shelters. It’s still a hellish system but contrary to what you might think seeing the endless misery in the subway stations, New York City takes its homeless obligations more seriously than most American cities.
