New York gets a bad rep

I work for a Boston-based company in Dublin. If you’re in marketing, you might have heard of them. If you’re in Dublin, you’ve certainly seen me wearing some form of swag at meetups.

Luckily, as part of my job, I get to travel to Boston at a regular enough frequency. I probably know that city as well as I know Dublin at this point. It’s a nice, clean city with the usual tropes of Americana: Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere, tall buildings and an infatuation with old TV shows.

A few weeks ago I spoke at the companies’ annual conference for the second year in a row. Once the conference business was done, my girlfriend flew over for a bit of holiday time in ‘Murica (read as: shopping).

We ‘did’ Boston for the weekend before heading down to the notoriously harsher planes of NYC. Boston friends constantly reminded me that NYC is harsher than Boston. People just aren’t as nice. There’s no green areas outside of Central Park. People are often outright rude.

Well, I’ve been before. But only for short periods where I’m being dragged around by a local to bars. I’ve never relied on my own senses to survive there. Now I would get the chance.

We stayed downtown near Penn Station. Super convenient location near Times Square and an abundance of subway routes around the city. And so we began a week of pure, unadulterated tourism.

The lack of niceties, green & a sense of general rudeness never appeared. NYC has as much green as other US cities. Which is impressive given the density of population in Manhattan & the usual Americana tropes mentioned above. People were lovely. Table & bar service was as good as anywhere I’ve eaten in America, and folks on the streets were down right overly helpful. I think Americans who think service in NYC is bad need to visit Paris.

NYC is easy to navigate for obvious reasons. However, one time we wanted to figure out which Subway line (which I constantly referred to as the U-Bahn) we were near & how it would take is to some location further Downtown, and so we took our our precisely folded subway map. The piece of map was the size of an iPhone. We did not look super touristy. A man standing nearby in a trilby asked where we were going. We told him, and he said to go two blocks that way to get to the right subway stop. We were on the right line. “Enjoy your trip.” No prompt, no hesitation. Just a polite exchange.

This was not an isolated incident either.

Another incident was weirder. “Hey buddy, where you from?” Ireland. “North or South?” South. Dublin. “Nice, you’re one of my ancestors.” He then proudly revealed his shamrock tattoo and shook my hand. No other reason for the exchange. He simply heard my accent from afar and felt compelled to say hello. What was surprising was he was so proud of being from the Republic of Ireland & not Northern Ireland. What was more surprising was that he was black. As opposed to a pasty ginger white dude.

The weirdest exchange was when we went into a bar for a lunch pint (we were on holiday!). We saw an Irish flag waving proudly outside a dark looking building. Perfect. The barman was Irish, but clearly lived in NYC a long time. He had that Gabriel Byrne kind of accent. At the bar was us (surrounded by Century21 bags), an off-duty fire fighter with as thick an Irish accent as you can imagine, two of his buddies and another lone American. All there for lunch. The Irish barman greeted the lone American with the worst line I’ve ever heard outside of a joke: “top of the morning to you.”

I could go on, but I thought I should note that New Yorkers are among the best humans I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing oxygen with. It was one of those trips that ended with us wanting to stay forever.

Oh, and I proposed there too (she said yes). So there’s that.