A Swedish Woman in New York

Our heroine arrived in New York at midnight on the same plane as Turtle. She will live with her family in a hotel in the countryside of New Jersey, while Turtle stays with his friends one block from Times Square. Life is fair. This is out in the bush, so the first night she had a hostel close to the airport. In fact, the hostel even picked her up from the airport, which is nice after a long trip. She mused about the fact that she seemed to know the English language better than the driver and the hotel receptionist, but the area was called Jamaica after all. When she entered her shared dorm room, ready to crawl into bed, someone was already lying in bed number 5. What on earth? A very unsuccessful communication with the Asian girl followed, after repeated excuse-mes and some poking, she murmured something, got up, and wandered out in the living room area. Strange. 

At the airport, when asking for directions one man (you know the anonymous white middle-aged business looking guy) who'd noticed the confused look in her faced and helped her out, asking her in a true New-Yrkian way: "Why are you staying in Jamaica?" It was not before she got up and out early Sunday morning, that Vanilla Ice realized why he'd asked it with such an emphasis. Jamaica, just like it would turn out, New Jersey, is very multiculti, which is the politically correct way to say that it's a segregated area with mostly Spanish speaking immigrants and African-Americans. She was uncomfortable in her skin. Walking around with a too thick sweater saying "University of California Santa Barbara" she was probably the only one who had attended college. Underneath, she had a T-shirt with neon colored "Las Vegas"-print, and showing that, she would probably had not received God's blessing from that self-proclaimed preacher in the corner. On the subway to Manhattan, she got acquainted with a tall colorful young man from Brooklyn, who very kindly offered to show her around the city and make her "Experience things she'd never imagined". Vanilla Ice felt terribly prejudiced when the first thing that popped into her mind was getting robbed in an alley. She wants to be tolerant and open-minded, and anything but racist, but today, she got extremely aware of the color of her skin, just like that day a long long time ago in Los Angeles. However, there was a difference between Chinatown in NY and Chinatown in LA, here there wasn't at all poor and many tourists walking around, in LA it was a ghetto.

She was supposed to meet  her aunt at 2 pm on Sunday, but she was lost in the public transportation between her hotel and Manhattan and missed the reunion. She was standing all alone in lower Manhattan, with a cell phone with a dead battery, not even able to call Turtle. And then it started raining. She bought an umbrella and wandered alone on Wall St, looking at New York Stock Exchange, discerned the Statue of Liberty in the fog. There was some contruction work going on at Ground Zero. 

Further north she saw the a picture perfect view of Chinatown, pulled up her camera ready to shoot, and everything went wrong. Lens error. No, no, no, no, no! She couldn't take pictures anymore. This was sad, especially since her iPod had met it's Waterloo in a wave and it seemed there was an epedemy among her electronics. She tried to memorize the views of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Her brother, the Pirate was supposed to arrive Sunday night. He didn't. She tried to trace him for a few hours before she got to know that his plane was delayed. He arrived in the morning, together with a sore throat. The vacation couldn't have had a worse start.