They've got cars big as bars They've got rivers of gold But the wind goes right through you It's no place for the old When you first took my hand On a cold Christmas Eve You promised me Broadway was waiting for me - The Pogues, Fairytale of New York
Finals ended on Dec 21st, grading on Dec 23rd and on the same day Susanne arrived from Cleveland where she's in the middle of doing a medical internship, and we spent Christmas here together.
After a period of intense work and without family, neither of us felt like it was really Christmas. The weather didn't help either: the temperature was hovering at around 8 degrees at midday, so it felt more like spring than winter. At Susanne's suggestion we used Dec 24th (heilger Abend in Germany), into a day of last-minute express christmisification. And it worked.
Starting from Morningside Heights, we walked right across Central Park, through huge flocks of black birds (starlings?), around the reservoir and into the southern part of the park (new territory for me which is a sad-but-true indication of how little time I've had to explore the city). Like children in a fairytale lost in the forest, we followed our noses to the boat house's hot spicy apple cider; it was a beautiful day and it was flooded with late afternoon light the same colour as the cider in our cups.
Further down, Central Park ends (my perspective) at 59th street where huge banners advertise luxury renovated apartments going for a festive two and a half million greenbacks. This is a corner of New York along 5th Avenue where the filthy rich stroll in self-parody and the window shopping torpedoed my last cynical anti-Christmasness. They must have teams of artists and a budget I'd rather not know (its art, right?)
Further down 5th Avenue is the bombastic Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Centre, decked out in rasta-coloured lights, dazzling with millions more watts of camera flashes from the surrounding throngs. Giant glittering snowflakes on the sides of buildings chime
kitch ... kitch ... kitch. It was interesting to note that, apart from this, the lights in public spaces in New York were modest (and that word is almost an insult here).
Further down we deliberately gave ourselves some last-minute Christmas shopping stress just before the doors closed (its the season for it), had some hot chocolate in front of the open-air ice skating rink in Bryant Park and a glass of expensive wine in a design bar just off Times Square before heading back to a laid-back meal with Abel, a friend at IHouse from Germany.
Not a conventional Christmas, but a day which truly left us feeling like it was Christmas.
Boston is a pleasant mix of a European and North American cities, sprinkled with top notch universities. This is the Frank Gerry Strata building at MIT; we also toured Harvard. Boston was a good five degrees colder than New York; it felt like winter there for the first time.
