NLEK

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. I am more often than not known as Gig. With a nickname deriving from a childhood passion to be a pig farmer, I’m pretty keen on the outdoor lifestyle and don’t mind getting my hands dirty. With a dream to one day be a travel writer I spend most of my time daydreaming about distant lands and faraway places. When I write I find myself lost in a combination of imagination and genuine experiences, and so this blog is my chance to showcase my writing style and to hopefully provide a few interesting insights into my travels, childhood episodes and loves lost.

So let’s start in New York, random I hear you say....well get used to it because I’m a relatively unstructured soul.

Catch the E Subway down to Prince Street. We jump on the train, giddy and elated at the idea of our next adventure, the New York underground. The gears crunch, the tramps shift and twist as the walls dance with vibrations. I clutch my metro ticket, a paper memory soon to take its place in a diary or scrap book of some sort. The silver blurs, the fish eye captures and adrenaline kicks through the veins, we are heading downtown. The place where neon boys can wear their ear muffs and anyone can leave their mark.

We reach our destination; it is more open and free than further uptown. Into downtown we wander, at home, comfortable in these oddly familiar, unfamiliar surroundings. The atmosphere is immediately different, the people are younger and the Nike high tops are significantly more retro. The air is bitterly cold, restaurant bus boys scatter salt carelessly on the pavements outside the glowing neon refreshment signs as New York prepares for CNN’s typically exaggerated prediction of “worst snowfall in twenty years”. The two of us stroll through the icy streets, barely a word is exchanged but currently there is no need for verbal additions, the aesthetic pleasures are more than satisfactory.

We decide in our cosmopolitan way to “do lunch”, but somewhere homely, somewhere with a sense of personality, somewhere with blue window sills and miss-matching chairs....Homemade lentil soup is on the menu, and it’s not long before the dented enamel bowls of steamy broth arrive with chunks of giabatta in a similarly distressed vessel. This is idyllic, the buttery liquid warms the throat and the window seat provides a constant film like entertainment, as we watch downtown go about its daily business.

Downtown boys. They run across the street dodging the traffic with a cheeky jump and twirl. Their neon jackets create slashes of colour, cutting across the grey New York City skyline, injections of creativity and passion.

To say that New York is a place of dreams would be a cliché, but for me New York is the place where my dreams have been realised and more importantly secured within my sight.