Internet meanderings: On gritty New York

At the end of my final year in school, my best friend and I convinced our mums to take us on a mother-daughter trip to New York before we headed off to University.

Frank Sinatra will tell you. Alicia Keys will tell you. Jay-Z will tell you- New York is the city of possibility. It’s the place where dreams are built and hopes are dashed.

Living in South Africa for my entire life made the idea of New York a completely foreign concept to me. The beauty of this country is completely different to the lure of a big city like New York. Seeing it on TV and in films made me desperate to visit and experience the vibe for myself. Surely, with all the hype surrounding it, it had to be amazing? But what if it was disappointing after all the years of building it up in my mind?

Living the high life

I hate flying.

That’s a lie. The up-in-the-air part I can handle; it’s the take-off and landing that turn my stomach into a cesspit of anxiety.

Earlier this year, I experienced the worst landing of my life. As Emirates flight EK 306 approached the landing strip at the Beijing International Airport it descended down as unpleasantly as possible. When I was younger during thunder storms, I was quite the wuss. My aunt Maggie would calm me down by telling me that the big bangs were simply God rolling potatoes down the stairs. “Why would God be doing that?” I would ask. She didn’t have an answer but it soothed me none the less. During that landing it felt exactly as if the plane was one of those potatoes bouncing its way down through the smog-ridden Chinese sky.

That flight made me even more of a nervous flyer (Well, take off and land-er).

My ambition in life is to be a travel writer and travel usually involves flying (unless I’m resigned to travelling by foot, car, camel and/or boat— actually don’t even get me started on boats. That’s a whole other post). So, you may ask, how the heck do I plan on making the ‘travel’ aspect of my ‘travel writer’ plan work?

Why I write

This was completed as an assignment for a Writing and Editing course I completed at Rhodes University. We were asked to think about why we write. I had to sit and think hard about my reason for adding my scribbles to a universe that is already so full of the ramblings of others.