Richmond Hill Flea Market (or How to Handle Prejudice and Mortal Fear and Still Have a Good Time)

This weekend, my wife and I visited Richmond Hill Flea Market, way way out in Queens. Richmond Hill is also the name of one of the main streets of Bournemouth, the town in Britain that I abandoned. Britain also has a Queen! The coincidences didn’t end there. The place looked uncannily like Bournemouth.

My wife had heard about the market online; she told me it had cheap stuff and sketchy people. We needed to go. Both the stuff and people didn’t disappoint!

Overall, it was a fun day, and we only feared for our lives once.

Here’s what happened:

Getting There

Geographically the market isn’t that far away from where I live, but thanks to the inefficiencies of the New York transit system, it feels like an epic trip.

New York’s public transportation is mostly pointed to midtown Manhattan; this is great if that’s where you’re going, or if you’re not leaving Manhattan, but irritating for trips to any part of the city that wouldn’t naturally involve heading through, or starting off there.

The only way to get to Richmond Hill from where I live is to take multiple forms of transportation that takes an hour, if you’re lucky.

Here’s the trip on a map:

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You may be thinking, why am I whining so much? Well, that above trip is 8 miles. 8 miles should be 20-30 minutes tops. The below trip, to Times Square is 13 miles, and takes less time, and involves no transfers:

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Ok, transfers and a bit of time are a small price to pay for a cheap flea market, but would it kill the city to invest in bullet trains to anywhere I might want to go? The answer is, probably yes.

Being There:

From its exterior, the flea market looked suitably depressing, as a proper flea market should. It takes place in an old Bingo Hall, that doesn’t appear to have been revamped since I was born.

Here’s the picture that the Richmond Hill Flea Market’s website uses to promote their exterior (please note the poorly Photo-shopped sign and shopping girls, the centre right one appears to be channeling Edvard Munch’s The Scream:

Here’s a closer comparison:

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This is my favorite thing of the entire week so far.

My wife also remarked how much this area of Queens looked like Bournemouth. Initially, I disagreed with her, but after a while, yes, I could see it, if you disregard the stuff like the American road signs and wooden building materials (that isn’t sarcasm, it’s literally like the place is Bournemouth with an American lick of paint.)

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This street looks particularly Bournemouthy

Inside the Market

Inside, the flea market was a mix of both the awful and incredible, sometimes at once. There were treasures and “treasures,” such as vintage jewelry and cans of bug spray with the lids missing.

Initially, I made my way through the whole thing very quickly. I was mostly looking for books; apart from clothes and food they’re one of the few things I don’t only use digitally. They had very few books on offer except for exercise guides from the 90s. I spotted an X-Files doll that looked incredibly ugly. Why do adults collect toys of TV shows that they like? Never seen the appeal. Especially when they look like this:

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Later, I took a slower look at the things, and had much more fun. I spent some time looking at the jewelry. Initially I had written off the merchandise as all being plastic, but on closer inspection, and through talking to stall runners, found out that they actually had some good stuff.

However, by far the most abundant thing on offer was prejudiced views. Being British, a lot of the sellers were interested in talking to me; and several times the conversation was going along quite well, until they mentioned that the problem with Britain nowadays was that there were too many insert token race or religion. Most had either not been to Britain, or hadn’t been since the 70s, so the information they were working off was shaky, at best. Several times this happened, so I resorted to my usual non-confrontational but disagreeing reply of “Yes, well, there are lots of people in Britain, and it’s getting along fine.” That’s right; I’m a social justice warrior.

Going Home

After my wife bought some items, and I gained new insights into how people view my home country, we decided to head home.

We had another trip through the maze that was the transportation system. On the first subway, we made the mistake of sitting opposite a man that initially seemed alright, but then spent the next ten minutes spitting on the floor, and announcing how he would like to murder someone in a bush. First, it seemed as if he was talking to us, but through sneakily peeking up from my book, I saw that he was looking down to the entire cart, more of an open invitation than picking on one person in particular. This is the kind of inclusiveness that needs to be taught to the Flea Market vendors.

This was 2pm on a Sunday.

We switched train as soon as possible.

Then we got home.

For those interested in what can actually be picked up, my wife bought a really nice designer handbag for $20, that she can’t find for less than a couple hundred dollars online. So, if you can tolerate the odd inappropriate comment and death threat, you too should go to the Richmond Hill Flea Market!

The Little Differences

People have spoken to death about the big differences between living in the US and the UK. However, there appears to be a dearth of talk about the little things, things that don’t stick in my mind all day, but which build up to give the unmistakable feeling that I really am as alien a resident as my immigration paperwork says. These things have, as far as I know, gone undocumented. There have been lists springing up over the last year about the differences most noticeable about living in the US (for example, tipping lots more, and the overreliance on cars,) but the thing is, I was expecting that. There are lots of little things that caught me unaware.

As I’ve been in America for over four months now, I can feel myself acclimatizing. I think that soon I’ll have stopped noticing them at all. So before it’s too late, here are a few of the differences:

Credit Cards are Stuck in the 80s

The first time I ate at a restaurant in America, I was incredibly confused. I was waiting on my first bank card, so my wife paid. When the waiter took her card, swiped it, and gave her a receipt to write the amount out, I didn’t get what was going on. Why not just use the chip?

In the UK, I’ve only known using chip and pin, and later, contactless to pay for things. I thought that little strip on the side was just for putting it into the cash machine, or nostalgia, or something. Not in America.

In that restaurant, my wife tried in vain to explain to me that you have to write the amount and tip on the paper, and not just type it into the machine. I couldn’t get it. In my defense, I was very jet lagged.

When my cards came through, I missed the chip and the contactlessness of my upbringing. I’ve now gotten used to the fact that I will lose valuable seconds when paying for things, by waiting for receipts and writing on them.

There are things like Apple Pay; but I can never see myself getting an iPhone, so I wait in hope for American cards to join me in the new millennium.

Door Knob Locks

I refuse to make this blog puerile. I could go into great detail about the differences in bathroom stuff; but am just going to mention this. In American homes, most bathroom locks are on the doorknob. This just seems strange.

I treated these with great suspicion when I first arrived. How could something so weak looking, and which doesn’t make a noise as it twists, lock the mighty door?

About a week into my American life, I found out they work when it repelled a potential bathroom usurper whilst I was using it, and my faith in this country’s ingenuity grew enormously.

Supermarkets are a Mess

When I was 13, I visited the world’s largest hedge maze. I needn’t have bothered.

I’ve spent the last few months attempting to navigate American supermarkets, with little sign of improvement. Things are a mishmash.

One nearby supermarket, that I go to when I can’t be bothered to walk half a mile to the better one, has its spices sorted not into a spice area, but by brand in five different places at different ends of the store.

I try to avoid asking the shop assistants for help as much as I can; but am getting into the habit of going into a supermarket, spending 20 minutes scouring the aisles for the particular item, giving up, finding the nearest shop assistant, and being told to go to an aisle where the item isn’t, and repeating the whole process again.

Delis Everywhere

I’ve been told that this is more of a New York thing than an American thing, but hey, it’s what I know.

Pretty much every little corner shop has a hot sandwich making deli in it. This is very convenient, but also means that there is a great variance in the quality of the sandwiches you buy; as some corner shop owners really aren’t equipped to handle fresh sandwich preparation.

My first ever Deli sandwich ordering experience was going great, until I noticed the preparer had green blobs where his teeth belonged. Once, I ordered a sandwich which turned out to be filled with plastic. That this happened to be at just about the lowest point in my house hunt made the incident much more depressing than it should have been.

On the other hand, I’ve had some great deli sandwiches. Often the price is cheaper than Subway, and the food of a much higher quality.

It also took me an eternity to work out that a "hero" meant a huge sandwich. That’s very American.

The Blizzard

Before this weekend, my only experience of bad weather had been the occasional lightning storm, which usually lasts for about two hours and sometimes knocks over some rickety sheds. On the south coast of Britain, about once a year an inch or less of snow will fall. This often induces mass panic, leads to the closure of schools, causes the temporary shutdown of businesses, and children desperately scrape at the ground in the futile hope of being able to make a snowball from the sludge.

This weekend, the second biggest blizzard on record hit New York City. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, although I had inkling that there would be lots of snow. How it would play out was entirely new to me. Luckily, it struck on a Saturday, meaning that neither my wife nor I had to be anywhere, so there were no public transportation woes to worry about, no risk of being stranded. Instead, we made the most of it. Here’s my experience.

The Calm Before:

To say that the Americans took the oncoming storm lightly is an understatement. I was surprised. This is probably the effect of me watching too many disaster movies, where people are running around, grabbing supplies and fighting over the last tin of beans in the middle of a crowded supermarket. Instead, on the Friday afternoon before the storm, I went to the supermarket to grab some water and food, and found the lines to be slightly longer than usual, with many people buying lots of water. There was no rushing, squabbling or unpleasantness.

As someone who once worked in a supermarket in Britain, I can say this is a marked difference to what I know. In my old supermarket, arguments happened all the time; if the store was to be closed for one day, for say Easter or Christmas, then hysteria would break out the day before, and security would often be called to disrupt fights.

The Storm:

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It started snowing late on Friday night. I didn’t notice it for hours and then looked out of my window to see the floor covered in snow. I was up until 4am (nothing like a good X-Files marathon during extreme weather), so saw it grow through the night.

I woke early. Yet more snow had fallen, but the view from my window didn’t give the impression of anything too intense. I was wrong. The view from my window is into a very sheltered courtyard, so relatively little wind was blowing about. This occurred to me at the back of my mind, but I was still convinced that the big one was, actually, quite small.

Reassured by the scene from our window, my wife and I decided to go outside. Our first attempt lasted about three seconds. The snow wasn’t falling calmly like outside our window, but shooting diagonally, like thousands of little pellets a second. We walked out and walked back in again. I don’t own a hat, so was going to go without one. This turned out to be impossible, so my wife lent me one of hers.

Now that I was properly head dressed we set out. Our intention was to go to the park, which is usually a brisk half mile walk. After a few more seconds of walking, we revised our destination to the end of the block. However, after a minute or so we were able to acclimatize to the snow very easily. It was still hitting us hard, but once you’re used to it, it’s very bearable. I even felt quite warm, despite the fact the snow was sticking to my coat, making me look like a huge frozen sneeze.

We re-revised our plans again, and kept on heading to the park. On the way, we took note of which shops were still open. It was the same route we took at Christmas to get to the subway, so it was interesting to see which event caused more closures. I can say that blizzard easily beats Christmas; on Christmas it seemed like half the shops were running like usual; in the blizzard we saw that only the 7/11, Dunkin’ Donuts and Wendy’s was open. I also suspect that I saw someone in Pizza Hut, but that could have just been the snow making me hallucinate. On the way back we found some delis, grocery stores and a coffee shop letting people in. I must say, I’m profoundly sorry to the coffee shop for my ice jacket melting all over their floors.

Us arriving at the park:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVtdbNYplr8&feature=youtu.be

We arrived in Prospect Park. Usually, it’s packed. Today, we had it mostly to ourselves. Occasionally, there was a small group of hardy explorers or skiers, or in one instance a jogger who wouldn’t let the blizzard ruin his routine, but it was eerily quiet on the most part. We got some good pictures, walked around and when it was starting to get dark, decided to head home.

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https://www.instagram.com/p/BA5buG3GFEk/?taken-by=whobalaya

The Storm Intensifies:

On the way back, the storm got worse. The snow, blowing in our faces, really started to sting. It was still really weird to see the city so deserted. My street is usually packed, but now there was just the occasional person shoveling snow, and maybe a police car.

It looked properly post-apocalyptic, and despite the now painful snow, got a couple of interesting shots of the city at night.

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The hardest thing about the journey home was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the snow, which in the intervening hours had built up so much more. My wife opted to walk in the road, while I stuck to the path. As both had areas where the snow was incredibly difficult to drudge through, it’s hard to tell which the better option was.

Eventually, we reached our apartment building, pulled open the door with a struggle, and got home, soaked.

The Storm Dies Down:

Luckily, New York landlords legally have to keep their apartments warm at no expense to the tenant; so when we got home the heat was pumping out.

I made a roast chicken dinner, and we enjoyed the evening at home. The snow died down, and stopped entirely at some point in the evening.

Even now, two days later, snow is still thick in the courtyard and is stacked in huge piles all along the side of the roads; but life in the city has gone back to normal, and people are just dealing with it.

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I don’t have a clue how long it will take for all the snow to melt, but it seems to be taking forever. I’m sure a heatwave will come along soon enough.

Reflections on the American Holidays

I hate January. I don’t think that needs any further explanation; everyone across the whole world is thinking the exact same thing right now.

What better way to celebrate my utter hatred of January than to dwell upon how great the holidays were? Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I’ve now experienced my first full holiday season in the USA, and noticed some big differences compared with what I’m used to. For one thing, in Britain we would never dream of calling the end of the year the holiday season, but over in America I’ve noticed it being said approximately a million times. Anyway, here follows a highly biased list of how specific holidays and celebrations compare between Britain and America!

Halloween

This is what I arbitrarily think of as the beginning of the holiday season. According to Wikipedia, the America holiday season should actually be considered as beginning with Thanksgiving, but this doesn’t seem right at all to me. On the one hand, it makes sense to not include Halloween, as no one tends to take the day off of work, but on the other, lots of people celebrate it, and it gets lots of hype. Also, in Britain at least, the Christmas adverts get churned out on TV the day after Halloween, so to me it makes sense to include it as the beginning. Disclaimer done!

In the UK:

In my childhood, I went trick or treating like most kids. This was usually something that lasted about an hour at most, and was only to the houses on our street.

My parents aren’t into Halloween, and are also super thrifty, so my brother and I had to wear the same outfit from the age of 6, until whenever it was we stopped trick or treating (probably an embarrassingly old age.) My costume was a demon/devil mask and red gown; my brother’s was a skull mask with a white gown. My Mum sewed together the gowns.

Nowadays, people say that Halloween is a bigger industry in Britain than ever before, kids even change their costumes every year, however, I personally have noticed very little of this. In my final years in my parents’ house, barely one set of trick or treaters would come around, and from leaving for University until leaving for America, I didn’t get one trick or treater visit any place I lived. I’ve been to some Halloween parties, but I can’t imagine that a box of plastic spiders and fake cobwebs make that much of a profit. How the industry is growing is a mystery to me.

In the US:

Wow. They like to do Halloween big. That may sound like stating the obvious, but I wasn’t prepared for just how big it is. In Britain, the few Halloween decorations that appear are put up, at most, two days before Halloween. In America whole streets are caked in Halloween decorations by the end of the first weekend of October. And the decorations just keep on coming.

For my wife and I, we spent last Halloween in my wife’s Aunt and Uncles’ vacant house in suburban New Jersey. It was the day before we moved into our new apartment in New York, so we were excited. We were miles away from anyone we knew, meaning a party or social event was out of the question, so instead we stayed in and watched Curb Your Enthusiasm all night. Spooky.

We saw lots of kids on the street, trick or treating. One thing that they were doing that I’ve never seen before is that their parents were convoying them from one location to another in a series of cars. It’s one thing to not watch scary films and all that when you’re an adult, but for children to go out on Halloween, with all sense of fear being diffused, by being driven along by your parents at a safe speed, struck me as depressing.

Very few of the trick or treating children came to our house, probably because they knew that for the past few years it had been vacant; and was therefore kind of scary. I can also imagine, that to the parents, the obvious signs of life coming from a house they knew to have been mostly empty for years, could only mean that hobos had taken over the building. With that in consideration, I decided to give the children that did come trick or treating extra sweets for their bravery and for blatantly disobeying their parents. You earned it!

https://www.instagram.com/p/9hS0dGGFG1/?taken-by=whobalaya

Thanksgiving

In the UK:

Doesn’t exist. It’s just any old Thursday.

In my old town there is a local business awards night that the company I work for often gets awards for, so the night usually had a celebration feel to it. Also, when my wife was living with me in Britain, she used to make a green bean casserole that she always makes for Thanksgiving. I was always stuffed from the awards night food, but oh well.

In the US:

It’s basically like Christmas without the Christmas. By that I mean that it’s a day off doing nothing and eating a big dinner, but not presents, or TV or anything like that.

It does have an inescapably Christmassy feel to it though. This may have been a little to do with the fact that we spent time putting up Christmas decorations and listening to Christmas music at my wife’s sister’s house. For me, it was enjoyable because it was my first chance to see a part of America that wasn’t New York or suburban New Jersey. My wife’s family all live in Atlanta, which is about a thousand miles down south (that’s not even being figurative).

Also, unlike Christmas, which has lots of little moments that make it up, Thanksgiving is centered entirely around the dinner. A lot of my wife’s family are vegetarians, so I was able to stuff myself on the food and not feel too bad about it afterwards. Win Win.

Christmas

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In the UK:

Everyone grumbles about how “Christmas gets earlier every year”, to the point that there is literally no way to talk about it without invoking a pile of clichés. I tend to notice Christmas things appearing in shops, pubs, streets and restaurants at some point in early September, which is highly irritating. Worst is the way that it slowly creeps in, starting with small displays and decorations that you catch in the corner of your eye; which slowly grow larger, and then engulf places in early November. By Christmas, you’re sick of the decorations.

As for Christmas week itself, in the past I’ve always spent it at home, with my family, like most other people. On Christmas Day, there’s barely a car on the street, everything except for hospitals and churches shut down, and everyone watches TV and eats constantly. The same for Boxing day, except some people flock to shops to try to find sales.

In the US:

Christmas in New York is something that has been done to death in the media. Everyone has an image of it, however, I found it to be very different from the picture painted in films like Elf and Home Alone 2.

It’s, in a way, much more low key. For one thing, the Christmas decorations on the most part don’t come out until after Thanksgiving. I came back to New York on the Sunday after Thanksgiving on a 16 hour coach ride, and saw the transformation as we went back into Manhattan. There were certainly a fair few decorations, but nothing more excessive than you might find in London at the same time of year.

My wife’s shown me some pictures of some places where she went Christmas shopping, and they look more like the decked out fare I had been imagining. I guess that my lack of Christmas decoration sightings might be because I restricted my Christmas shopping to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Center, but still, I had the impression that any shopping district would go overboard.

Christmas Day itself was very different, compared to what I’m used to. I don’t know about most of the country, but in New York there is no way near the level of shut down that is experienced in Britain. Many of the subways were still running, as were the trains out and into the city. I know this, because my wife and I went out to New Jersey by train to meet her Aunt and Uncle for Christmas dinner. On the way to the subway, I noticed that most of the shops along the street were open and trading. Strange. Also, when we arrived in midtown Manhattan to switch to the train, it was full of people. Why weren’t they home?

We took the train to New Jersey, and had a big buffet dinner in a restaurant. It was great. No cooking and all the food you could want. I know that some people eat Christmas dinners in restaurants in Britain, but for me it was completely new. We spent three hours in the restaurant in the end, and had all different kinds of roasts, sides and desserts. Three hours well spent!

Later that evening, my wife and I went to her friend’s Christmas party in Brooklyn. Her friend is Australian, and pretty much all of the other guests were too. It was also about 21 degrees Celsius outside, so it felt like Christmas in my imagination of Australia. Only in America can you have two different continent’s Christmases in the space of one day.

New Year

In the UK:

The entire world tends to treat New Years as a big irritating party. Sometimes, I take part in this and go out and drink till I can’t remember the decade, let alone year. Sometimes, I do the same but by staying in.

In the US:

We didn’t go out to Times Square, or Coney Island, or anywhere. Our New Year’s Eve was more like a traditional Christmas Day. We sat in and watched TV. Makes for a boring end to both 2015 and this blog post, but there you go.

Let’s all get through January and make 2016 not 2015!

My Wedding

I’ve been married for just over a week now. I couldn’t be happier!

Growing up, I never saw marriage as holding much appeal, no need to get a piece of paper to prove something you already know, and so on and so forth. However, being kept apart from my wife for almost a year whilst waiting for my US visa to be processed has completely changed my attitude. I know that when I married last week, it wasn’t just to fulfil the requirements of my visa; it was much more profound and felt completely right.

Our wedding was the opposite of big and showy, it didn’t have any lavish preparations, but felt perfect nonetheless. We married in the City Clerk’s office in Manhattan (the US equivalent of a registry office). It probably isn’t what many people would consider their ideal wedding venue, but my wife and I loved it all the same; and in many ways it was exactly the wedding we wanted.

It’s hard to pin exactly why marrying in a City Clerk’s office was so right, but there are a few things that come to mind that contributed to it. I’ll list them below:

1. You’re around lots of other marrying couples

There was definitely an atmosphere in the building, which came from all of the couples, of all shapes and sizes, that had also chosen this as their wedding day. The soon to be husbands and wives, and their family members, were understandably incredibly happy. We didn’t speak to any of the other couples, but I don’t think it’s too pretentious to say that there was definitely a collective shared happiness in the building.

2. Despite all of the people, it’s intimate

The only witnesses in our ceremony were my mother in law, and my wife’s friend, who took charge of photographs. It felt great that the moment we became married was shared by just a few people. It did make for a bit of an odd question when the marriage official asked if anyone objected to the marriage though, I’ll say that.

3. It’s an incredible building in New York City

The City Clerk’s office was much more than some grimy old council building that I imagine acts as the default wedding venue of most places in the world. This was impressive; stone architecture, marble floors (if I remember correctly) and heavy wooden doors. It looked the part, made us happy, and for about a thousandth of the cost of a typical New York venue.

The actual ceremony itself was short, sweet and ended with us both married and optimistic and hopeful for the future. Afterwards, we sat outside, where a group of schoolgirls cheered a gay couple who just got married. Our friend informed them very loudly that we had also got married too, which prompted a less enthusiastic cheer, but the attention soon went back to the gay couple. Never mind, it didn’t dampen our spirits, and with gay marriage being such a recent thing I guess it deserves more prompts of cheering. Still, my wife and I were forced apart for eleven months; but then that isn’t quite so visually obvious when you see us.

After the wedding, our friend had to get back to work, and my wife, mother in law and I all went to Little Italy and had a big meal, courtesy of my mother in law. My mother in law said that she had gained a son, and seemed ecstatic, which of course made me feel delighted to be part of the family.

Later, we went back home and watched a Russian film from my mother in law’s recommendation. It was an unconventional end to a unique wedding day; but I wouldn’t swap it for anything. I haven’t even mentioned that it was an unseasonably warm December 11th.

Unfortunately, there were very few travails or missteps on the day to note down here. My family weren’t there, but I had been used to that eventuality for a long time; also our wedding rings, being Russian/rolling/trinity bands were a bit difficult to put on, but apart from that, literally nothing went wrong. Perfect.