Postcard from New York City - Iconography

NYC is enormous. Although you can walk a block in a minute, there is block after block after block, and the city expands vertically as well as horizontally. Other cities may have their showpiece spires and single tall buildings but New York has hundreds of the bloody things. Block after block after block of skyscraper and money. Each block looks, if not the same, then similar. When I visited many New Yorkers looked the same too, in that they had enormous puffa jackets, scarfs and hats on. This is not a fashion statement, New York is a coastal city on the Atlantic with no Gulf Stream to keep it cosy and is bloody cold.

Each corner has a hot dog cart on it and although I had promised myself that I'd have a hot dog off a street vendor in new York as an 'experience', the phrase 'suicide dog' kept going through my head and I bottled it.

One of the most constant images in new York, on it's way to becoming an icon like the yellow cab or statue of liberty, is the Starbucks coffee cup. Not only was every second person in the street walking along with a bucket sized Starbucks cup in their hand, but our hotel was 'proud to serve' Starbucks coffee in the restaurants and even the tea making facilities had Starbucks paper cups, well, beakers more like, rather than china cups. New Yorkers love their Starbucks so much that they actually take their Starbucks coffee into restaurants. In two places I saw people sitting eating with a Starbucks coffee beaker next to them. That's one trend that I can't see catching on in London, although having tasted the food in NYC I can see the attraction of taking your own food and drink into a restaurant and treating it as you would a picnic area.

On the sidewalks though, every second person has their Starbucks in their hand as they walk along. Actually, it's more like amble along, strolling to work at half nine in the morning. This might give a clue as to why America's title as an economic superpower is slipping. While the suits are walking down Forty Third street to work, slurping from their their bucket of latte, Shen Zhao has been at his desk for ten hours already. In fact he doesn't sleep, he doesn't have a bucket of coffee, he's got a bucket of black market amphetamines supplied to him by his bosses.