I have learned that most patterned clothing for women is passe. Solid coloured items only…with the occasional exceptions being a tiny pattern on a 👚 blouse. Name brand sneakers or else sandals 🩴 are a must for those who walk around the streets. Good to know. I did fine on the footwear, not so well on the patters, which instantly pegged me as Tourist Trash, haha.
Two visits to any diner makes you a “regular” especially if you happen to be Jewish or Greek. Being a regular means warm greetings 🖖 and great service from the staff, along with happy banter back and forth. Three or more visits brings a nearly ecstatic reaction from the diner owners.
Even in the higher scale neighbourhoods along the Upper East Side, streets like Lexington, Park and Madison Avenues, you will find the occasional addict and/or homeless person, covered in filth, passed out on the sidewalk or nodding out while slumped against a building. It is very sad.
I learned that cars in the lane on the bus driver’s side of the bus lanes have to jostle over and cut across in front of the bus in order to make a right hand turn. If the bus suddenly surges forward at that same time, collisions between car and bus are narrowly avoided. Drivers are necessarily aggressive here so they don’t let the fact that the bus beside them has the same right and obligation to drive forward when the light turns green that they themselves do! Ergo, I have learned I do not want to sit in the very front bus seat watching the near disasters happen. I have learned the New York City Transit drivers do not receive the “danger pay” I believe they deserve!
I have learned I am capable of walking 5-6 miles per day several days in a row with no other negative side effect than a day of exhaustion following.
I learned last evening that my son can play the shofar we ordered for him rather well. God bless all those childhood trumpet lessons.
I have learned that our new family of in-laws are voracious readers and especially enjoy fiction with detailed character studies, which I am not so jazzed about. While a certain amount of character development is of course necessary in order to make a fiction story understandable and well written, am I wrong to be somewhat uncaring about the lifelong character of people who don’t actually exist? I mean, yes it is interesting to a point, but is it worth spending several weeks of book club discussing this? For them yes, for me not so much. I learned to deal with the joy on their faces last night at dinner when they would ask me if I had read such and such a book….many of them older novels that are enjoying a modern day resurgence for unfathomable reasons….and I would say yes, only to have their faces fall when I admitted I remember very little about the characters in any of them, since it was 25 years ago or more, sigh….my husband and I will not fit in well with this bunch. He doesn’t read novels at all. I read mostly for relaxation so I generally forget details after so many intervening years. Ho hum…I cannot get that excited about people who aren’t real. That’s just me.
I have learned that the amount of online paperwork and number of new phone apps required to live here, that have forced us to get with it as far as our being so behind with the level of tech we need to be able to use, has been a blessing in disguise, that we actually are capable of learning how to fill out online forms and flash our phones with the best of them. Yay us! It will give us more confidence back at home too.
I have learned that despite my years of rural and small town living I am still pretty much a big city girl at heart.
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