Farewell to the past with all its smiling dreams

What may seem like the beginning of a winterly depression, is a translated quote from “La Traviata”- one of the many things I got to see in New York City. And it was definitely one of the highlights: Orchestra premium seats in the Metropolitan Opera and Verdi’s famous opera with a Violetta beautifully sung by Anja Harteros (a German soprano, audio excerpt here). Not only the music was great (the opening of Act 3 began with an almost ethereal sound), but also the incredibly rich scenery. The curtains went up and my jaw dropped: plush, crimson, gold, the stage was transformed into a Baroque chamber with luxurious fabric in an opulent backdrop.

In short: So, I went there with four French, who all study at my school. We took the bus to NYC, arrived in the morning, and stepped into a fully-scheduled day: Times Square, Broadway, Rockefeller Center, Brooklyn, Museum of Modern Arts (Monet’s most amazing water lilies, and of course all the Pollocks, Beuyses, Gauguins…), Halloween Parade, Greenwich Village, Lower East Side.

The next day started off with a wonderful breakfast in SoHo and a walk in Central Park where we met up with a friend from Philadelphia. We had an enormous slice of pizza in a park, went to Little Italy and Chinatown, and finally chose from the largest menu of international beers you can imagine in a bar in East Village. Well, I don’t think we left out anything you CAN do on your first trip to New York: Statue of Liberty at sundown by  boat, Manhattan Skyline by night, Brooklyn Bridge, UN, Met, MET, Harlem, Columbia University, etc.  We walked till we had blisters on our feet, through little dark alleys, and Berlin-like promenades, we ate green tea ice-cream in Chinatown with its steamy, crowded, smelly streets where shops offer the most peculiar things (red olives, dried fish in sweet shops, crabs feebly waving their pincers at you, veggies in every color, shape and sort you can and cannot imagine), we had the best hamburger together with hip SoHo-youngsters, we strolled around Harlem, we took the subway from Uptown to Downtown, from East Side to West Side and back, we met very interesting people with the most international backgrounds, we saw the New York Marathon, and finally, the elections…

My impressions are as mixed as the Five Boroughs, and so are my feelings towards them: I like New York; some parts remind me painfully of Berlin, others are just uncomparable, and a few make you dizzy and uncomfortable. Living and working in the Big Apple, can be fun, I guess, but you are likely to feel lonely. To enjoy your life, you have to be able to afford it, and in order to do that in New York you have to dine out, go to clubs, know the right places and the right people, and best of all, be well dressed and pretty.

Well, I could tell you a lot more, for example that every New Yorker who thinks something of him/her seems to have an i-Phone and is using it constantly or that the city still seems to be divided in black and white, but let’s get to November 4th, election day!

The flight

A nightmare! But I’ll make it quick: I was supposed to fly from Munich to Paris, wait there for four and a half hours and then fly to Montréal. So I got up at 4 in the morning, went to the airport, checked in… only to be told at 8 o’clock (after everybody had checked in) that the flight would be, fasten your seatbelts, FIVE hours late!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Do you know what that meant? I sat there, dumbstruck, sure I hadn’t understood correctly. But yeah, it was true. It didn’t take a lot of calculations to figure out, that there was no way I was going to make the flight out of Paris, either. So what did I do? Well, I cried. Then I tried every solution I could think of. I guess, I have to mention that I booked two seperate flights, which means: no refunds!!!!!

I called Paris, I called the airline company- only to be told that my flight was lost and that I should better book a new one. There was another flight with the same airline leaving at 6 p.m. that same day…Well, I decided to fly to Paris and buy a new there at the counter. That turned out to be a really smart decision: Because whoever uninformed person of that airline that told me my flight was lost, was wrong. In the end, I only had to pay 40€ and I got a new ticket! Phew! So, without any more inconvenience, I boarded the plan which took me after an eight hour flight over the Atlantic and into the realms of Canada.

Beneath the sky of a blood red sundown, we finally sank down onto the sea of glittering lights that should be my home for the oncoming year…to be welcomed by the immigration office. What I experienced there, you can read under “québécois”.

there and back again

About a month, a week and a day ago, I took off for the North American Continent once more. Destination: Montréal, Québéc, Canada. Duration: one year. Sensation: curiosity, excitement, fear. Now, those five weeks feel already like an eternity.

So, if you wanna know what it feels like in the United States’ big silent brother up north, come join me on my stroll through Laurentian woods, Montreal’s big city jungle, a Canadian university, and life on the threshold between anglo- and francophonia.