Each month in Home from Home we ask someone to compare Dublin with another city in which they have lived. Sometimes they are Irish who have lived (or are still living) abroad, sometimes they are expatriates in Dublin. This month we spoke with Annelise on seeking her fortune in the Big Apple.
How did you find yourself moving to Brooklyn initially?
The number one reason is that I’ve an American passport, so it was always kind of a given that when I finished university, I’d move to America to seek my fortune / take on an unpaid internship. And New York made sense because I’ve family in California, and my family in Ireland, so this is a good midpoint for me, pretty much exactly a six hour flight each way. It also helped that my boyfriend at the time had just moved over, so it made it less scary than coming over solo. I don’t think it ever occurred to us to live in Manhattan; it was always the plan to live in Brooklyn.
New York is not a place that bears comparison to Dublin, as it’s not European, or close, or on in anyway the same scale. Are there anyways things that you think are similar?
I spend most of my time with Irish people here, so there’s similarities in how we spend our time – i.e. we go to pubs. Irish people tend to form a communities quite quickly, you meet people who you knew from home, and through them you meet other people they know from home and then you all form friendships based on a shared sense of humour and cynicism and love of pints.
But apart from that I think New York is just so much its own thing, it’s hard to compare it to anywhere. The boroughs of New York are constantly reinventing themselves and changing and then there’s an immediate nostalgia created around that past and I haven’t experienced that anywhere else.
There’s entire books comprised of essays about what it’s like to move to or leave New York, and it features as an extra character when it’s present in films or TV. There’s good and bad aspects to that, obviously – sometimes it’s exciting to live in such a diverse, massive, absorbing city and other times it feels totally exhausting and overwhelming.
To me London when I visit seems overwhelming and confusing as a big city, whereas New York when I lived there was more like a theme park, easy to understand, get around and everything clearly demarcated. Do you think that’s a fair description of the city? Or was I just to naïve?
Yes I think for the most part it’s fairly easy to get around, which is one of the best parts. For such a big place, it feels welcoming in that sense.
I think of Manhattan as like a Super Mario game where each place – Times Square, Upper West Side, East Village etc – is its own little world. And once you get the hang of the subway system, which I think is fairly easy to navigate, it becomes very easy to get around and visit all the worlds. Once you cop that everywhere takes minimum 45 minutes to get to, no matter what Google Maps tells you, you start to be slightly more on time as well.
Brooklyn feels harder to get around. The first time I got off the Subway in Bushwick, where I live now, I was like, ‘What is this industrial black hole and where are any landmarks?’ It takes a bit longer to get your bearings here, I think.
What do you miss about Dublin, and what in particular would you like to bring back to Dublin from New York?
I don’t know that I miss things… Once you move away, you realise that wherever you are, you’ll be missing something, so it’s best to just let all that go. But I suppose I miss how in Ireland it’s easier to feel part of everything, to feel like you’re keeping up with the latest in tv or music or whatever cultural thing is happening, or that you’re in the coolest restaurant or pub. You feel a bit more included, whereas in New York it feels easy to get left behind – by the time you know something is happening, it usually means it’s over, or that there’ll be a five hour queue.
And then of course I miss my friends, family, cat, etc. Once or twice a year there’ll be something will happen at home, like the recent collective joy at the good weather, and it makes me feel far away.
If I were going to bring one practical thing back it’d probably be the general convenience of everything here, like being able to buy beers or food at any time of the day or night. I think if I were to move back tomorrow, that’d take a long time to adjust to. Like, what do you mean I can’t buy hummus at half 4 in the morning?
In what ways is New York more class / grim than Dublin?
New York has Broadway and The Met and all those things that are amazing and special to here. And even if realistically I rarely benefit from access to those things on a day-to-day basis, just the fact I could go to the top of the Empire State building if I wanted is cool. My favorite way to explore any city is trying new restaurants and bars and New York is such an amazing and endless source of both. In the immediate area around my apartment there’s always new places to try every week so it’s not even a question of having to be particularly forward planning to go somewhere I’ve never been before, I just leave my apartment and walk a block and there’s a new motorcycle garage slash barbecue restaurant! Then there’s being squished in a crowded subway while red signs flash reminders to be wary of sexual harassment and everyone keeps their eyes glued to the floor, and that’s grim. But every single time I see the Manhattan skyline, I feel very lucky to be here.
Is your life in Brooklyn more like an episode of Girls or an episode of Friends?
My life is most like the opening credits of canceled-in-its-prime Nickelodeon show Taina.
