Brooklyn, New York, was just so hip! Yet so overwhelming!

Brooklyn was just so hip! There was more organic juice, quinoa and hipsters with babies and dogs than you could poke a stick at! What surprised me most was that it was so incredibly hot in the city!

I arrived at my AirBnB accommodation in Brooklyn after a hellish taxi ride… So hot, no aircon, ridiculous traffic jams and we just sat there and watched the meter tick.

I was so incredibly overwhelmed by it all. The people, the traffic and the crowds. My host was so hip and cool. He tripped off to Church in a very spiffy white ensemble.

Sunday morning in Brooklyn was full of spiffy African Americans in suits clutching their bibles and sassy mummas in even sassier Sunday hats… I loved them!

I get the feeling you wouldn’t want to mess with some of those women they totally enthralled me! Thankfully this time, the apartment is quiet and much better than my last AirBnB stays. It’s in a basement so it is also cool, an added bonus when it is so hot! It is just a little odd, a whole pile of underground extensions, I do wonder about the legality, but so cheap compared to a hotel in the Big Apple!

I dropped my bags and bravely set out to catch the underground to meet up with the New York by night tour… I had absolutely no concept of the vastness of the city. I felt dazed on the train, and just prayed I was heading in the right direction, because all I could see was a train crowded with commuters. After walking the wrong way several times, I finally connected with this ‘full on New Yorker’ tour leader she was so abrupt and rude to everyone but proved to be competent and affable in the end. There is no way I could have done it all on my own. We indulged in dinner on Mulberry St in Little Italy, a champagne cruise and we saw all the major sites.

I stayed in Brooklyn just to avoid the Manhattan circus. The Brooklyn Museum and Botanical Gardens were a welcome respite. The taxi drivers have no GPS or maps and no concept of borough, I found that most irritating, and hopped out of a few cabs, because they did not know where to go and this is not leaving Brooklyn!

The finally I worked out where Williamsburg was, and it was really hip and happening, including impromptu zombie marches down the Main Street.

I felt very disappointed that New York really got the better of me, and it was so much more difficult alone. While Brooklyn was fantastic, it was a long commute to Manhattan, and I found the underground difficult to navigate on my own. I walked for 30 minutes to connect with one line that would take me to the Museum of Modern Art, but I got lost. I had given my lonely planet away, and I had mapped it all out and highlighted points… I wish I hadn’t! Then I got out at the wrong stop, walked the wrong way in the heat…Finally got to the Museum of Modern Art and there was a two hour wait to get in!!! So I tried a different line to get home but alas I got lost again, and decided to stay at home. I was becoming quite ill (all revealed in next blog) and felt overwhelmed by it all, it was worse than Beijing underground!

So the next day I flew back to Phoenix where the story continues…

Have you been to Brooklyn? What did you think of it, overwhelming or full of excitement?