10 things I miss in New York after living in Ukraine

I love New York. He reminds me of an unlucky man whose house is always a mess, strange, unpredictable, but at the same time terribly charismatic. I love it first of all for its “difference” - for the opportunity to travel around the world by taking the metro. In the two years of living here, I have become so accustomed to human and cultural diversity that if you put me in any European city now, I would probably get bored. But, nevertheless, this city is very, very far from ideal - so it’s time to wash its bones. So, 10 things I miss about New York.

Photo: Lydia Kalinina

Washing machines

Of course, I was already accustomed to carry things to the laundry room and even achieved such material well-being, just to leave a bag with dirty laundry and pick up a clean one in the evening - neatly folded and sorted by caring staff. But, nevertheless - until ??? Why does the whole world erase for its own pleasure, how much it pleases and when it pleases, and only we have to carry these bales onto ourselves and spend time and money on it? There are several reasons for this - and there are no places in extremely valuable New York apartments for washers, and the pipes in the houses are old, and so on and so forth. But this is not easier for us.

Balconies

In Ukraine, if the house has more floors than one, a balcony is the same mandatory structure as a bathroom or kitchen. I grew up on the ground floor and suffered from a lack of a balcony all my life - and here you are, I came to a city where there are often no balconies even in high-rise buildings. We are not talking about balconies on fire escapes. Yes, of course, when I lived in an apartment with such a balcony, we arranged summer meetings with wine, and the neighbors made a greenhouse out of them at all (which, by the way, is forbidden - you can’t force the fire balcony), to drink coffee is not very convenient. So the question is where are the balconies, eh? Pity you, or what?

Cozy cafes with a summer terrace

I remember in the first month of my life in New York I wrote: there is a problem with cozy cafes and bars! Then, having gotten used to it a little, I realized that, of course, they exist here, but not like in Europe - when you walk down the street, you can safely go into any place, and it’s guaranteed to be cozy. Here you can easily run into a disgusting interior, plastic dishes, noise (I hate noisy places, and American classic bars are just like that, here you have to shout over everyone and everything in order to shout to the interlocutor who is sitting next to you). But in the summer, this problem gets worse, because finding a cozy cafe is half the battle, but finding a cafe with a cozy summer area, and at the same time being able to have dinner there without leaving a week’s salary, is another quest. I carefully save each such place in Google maps so as not to lose it, I treasure it like a treasure, and more and more often I remember Europe, where every second one can boast of a summer terrace, surrounded by greenery, with wooden carved chairs, checkered tablecloths and tableware “to match”. institution.

Photo: Lydia Kalinina

Shop

It is worth making a reservation - I am writing about everything in New York, not only about Manhattan, where there is no problem with "where to sit." But only you go beyond it - goodbye. If there is no park nearby, there are no shops. In Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx, if you just want to drink a cup of coffee while sitting on a bench, you will need to go a very long time to the nearest one. There are shops either at bus stops, or in parks, or in some residential complexes (most often dysfunctional), or in playgrounds - but there is no entry for adults without children.

Trash cans

If you are not a pig, but there are a lot of pigs in this city (proven by mountains of garbage in Manhattan), then, in order to throw away the ice cream wrap, you will often have to stomp a few blocks. Often, sighing, I stuffed the garbage in my bag - simply because I was tired of carrying it in my hands. Why not put more urns in the city - a mystery to me.

Good grocery shopping

In fact, at every corner in any of the five boroughs of New York, you will find deli or Grocery. The first is a cooking shop, the second is just a grocery store. In fact, I do not see any particular differences, except that deli Most often, in addition to the standard meal, they also make all sorts of hot sandwiches and coffee. But here they have one similarity: they are all extremely nasty. Sometimes it seems to me that a license to trade in owners of small food outlets is given only on the condition that they will be uncomfortably there, the goods will be piled at random (and most often will be from the category of the cheapest and worst), everything will be around and not dirty, but somehow depressing, and every normal buyer will go in there only in one case - if he did not manage to buy something in a normal large network store. Why so - a mystery to me, and I am still in search of cozy shops. While such, by the way, were either in the central or in the Russian-speaking areas.

Photo: Lydia Kalinina

Duvet covers

Amazing business. If you buy an American set of bed linen - there will be 2 sheets in it (one most often on an elastic band - to put on the mattress) and two pillowcases. And all. Americans do not use duvet covers. They are covered with blankets - and then they just wash them. Kill me. I do not understand how so. Maybe in this way the nation decided to rebel against the process that everyone hated - to fill the blanket in a blanket cover? In any case, IKEA personally saves me - there are duvet covers. True, there in the set of bed linen is not included a sheet with an elastic band - it must be bought separately. That's all I think - and someone told all these manufacturers that they had already invented such a miracle all over the world - as a COMPLETE SET (yes, yes, these are the words of the same root) of linen: a bed sheet, a duvet cover, two pillowcases. Amen.

Cherries

No, seriously, I'm not joking. Cherry is not sold here. More precisely not so - you will find here simply mountains of cherry jams, cherry jam, canned cherries, frozen cherries - but you do not buy fresh here. Nowhere. They say that they saw them in Russian stores, but I have not met them, so for now for me - nowhere. The mystery is that while cherry pies are sold here every step of the way; not having found a natural cherry, I stopped buying them - it means that they all are baked incomprehensibly from what! Well, either there is some underground cherry warehouse, not accessible to mere mortals. If you ask about cherries in the store, they will happily offer you a sweet cherry, because this is what they most often call cherry (although generally it is sweet cherry). Ah, and at home I often baked cherry strudel.

Dog permits

Dogs love here, to my joy. Moreover, the dogs are usually very friendly, they are allowed to stroke them as much as they like, and the owners are happy to answer all the questions - what kind of dog does the dog have, what is their name and how many years. But there is one thing - if you, after watching the amazing dogs, decide to start yourself - not the fact that it will. It is not everywhere allowed to live with a dog. House policy is often either “no pets ”, eithercats ok"Or"small pets ok". While living in Ukraine, I could not even imagine that some kind of building management could forbid a person to have a dog. But like this. If you want a dog, move where you can. And try to find it.

Photo: Lydia Kalinina

Brooklyn Queens

Brooklyn and Queens are two boros located on the island of Long Island "very tightly" to each other. By car from one area to another go no more than half an hour (if there are no large traffic jams). By public transport - at least one and a half. That's because the metro line connecting them is exactly one - and it is not very convenient. In other cases, you have to go through Manhattan. You look at the map and barely restrain the flow of words in pure Russian: well, here it is, nearby, why should I make such a detour? Or maybe by bus? Not. There are no buses that would do the simple thing - “throwing” from Brooklyn to Queens, in a straight line. All - detours. As a result, in Queens, which is next door to Brooklyn, I often get longer than in the distant Bronx. My friends living and working in Manhattan tried to add to this item “few metro lines connecting the western and eastern parts of the city,” but I said that they were bourgeois and it was easy to walk from west to east Manhattan.

It seems that this is the main thing. I’ll make a reservation right away - yes, everything listed is in the city and you can, of course, advise the author (that is, me) to work more, earn more, live in a better area, or better yet, in your own house with a washing machine and a balcony and blah blah blah ( I'm already waiting for comments like this, they are my favorite). Well, when this happens, I will write another 10 points on the topic of what I miss in New York, but for now, so on.

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