Summer in the City

means cleavage cleavage cleavage. Well, it does, but those are Regina Spektor's words.

Summer in the city, for me, means smells smells smells. The heat and the humidity of New York City summers accentuates all the city has to offer the schnoz.

For the worse: Urine smells are more pungent. Dog poop takes a new, smellier life form. And if you are from Staten Island, the dump really rares its ugly head in the summer.

For the better: Fresh vegetables and herbs on windowsill gardens finally have life. Fragrance from the flowers sold at the corner delis can be enjoyed from across the street. Ice cream ice cream ice cream!

But for a prettier and just all around better presentation of this subject, I again turn to nytimes.com for help. In Op-Art, Jason Logan has created an interactive map of Manhattan that details of the smells he encountered during one sweltering weekend tour of Manhattan. Sometimes I think I should have just worked for the New York Times and found creative ways to express my love for NY, and get paid for it!

Back

We've returned to Boston and our old lives. We've returned to using our bikes as our main medium of transportation, sleeping in an elevated bed, and having excellent water pressure in the shower. And we've also returned to taking the time to preparing our own meals.

This last one, surprisingly, has been a bit of a shocker. As I cooked breakfast this morning, I felt strange investing any time into our meals, even though we've been cooking in our lives away from home for almost a decade. Though I of course remembered all the usual motions of it, the routine felt foreign, almost wrong. For the last two months in Bangkok, we've been going out to the street every morning to buy breakfast. We'd get our Chinese donuts freshly made or our Puff & Pie bakery pastries or our 7-11 banana breads, each for less than 75 cents, and our usual big iced coffee for less than a dollar. We'd then come back to the apartment and watch CNN or True (i.e. Thai HBO) or Channel V (i.e. Thai MTV, but plays only music videos, so more like MTV of the 80s) and enjoy our ready-made meal. The whole routine provided a cheap, delicious, and filling breakfast after very little time investment.

Preparing meals is of course one of the many aspects of the culture shock/reacclimatizing Lawrence and I are experiencing. Funny how quickly you can get used to another way of life in just two short months.

More to come on the funny things about our life in Boston I never realized would be so thought-provoking as well as (hopefully) posts about what everyday life was like in Bangkok.