I was only in New York for the weekend. I tried to make the most of it. Despite living here for over a decade, I find my trips back through the city are often transitional. I’m passing through more often than not, and when I am just hanging out here I’m often recovering from something or other. But I love New York like no other place on Earth.¹ And that makes the visits where I treat it like a waypoint a bit melancholy.

So despite the abbreviated time, I made a concerted effort to reach out to friends.² And due to some remarkable serendipity, it worked out amazingly well. One of my friends³ hosts a monthly party/hangout in Brooklyn for pretty much everyone with a plausible excuse to drop in. And not only was I in town, but multiple out-of-town friends happened to turn up at the same time. I got to spend the better part of the afternoon and evening and had a great time catching up with everyone.

And that’s really one of the things you lose if you’re constantly traveling. Virtually everyone I see is deliberate. It takes planning and forethought and effort. I either need to make arrangements with people to meet them or arrange to be someplace where I know a bunch of my friends are likely to turn up.

That’s one of the reasons I keep attending larps and larp conventions; it gives me an opportunity to see people I otherwise never see. But even then, it’s not the same; there are workshops or panels or games or any number of other things which get in the way of just socializing. So it’s a delight when it happens. And I need to do more of it.

While I was in New York I also got some errands done: picked up some medications, got an International Driving Permit so I could rent a car in the next year in Eastern Europe, got replacement debit and credit cards,⁴ and ordered some traveling supplies.⁵

I also replaced my mobile phone. I’d been using a Galaxy Flip Z 3, and was hoping to get another year or two out of it. I didn’t. Everybody kept asking me if the screen was okay. The screen was great. But the hinge wasn’t. It’s been refusing to open fully for a while now, and recently it’s been getting worse. It won’t lay flat on tables. It reached a point where I just couldn’t stand it.

Apparently, they’re susceptible to getting dirt in the hinge. I’d imagine it’s just a matter of disassembling the phone and cleaning the hinge assembly, but good luck finding a repair shop that’ll do that. You need to take it to an authorized phone repair or mail it to Samsung, and Samsung will just replace the hinge and charge you $500 to do it.

It’s expensive because the hinge is integrated into the screen assembly, so it’s not just a matter of replacing the hinge.⁶ I was mad enough to try and switch back to a Pixel phone, but they were only going to give me $100 trade-in value on my phone. I’ve got the latest model Samsung now⁷ and I’m still getting used to having a giant slab of glass and metal in my pocket again. I’ll miss the Flip phone. But I’m not going to touch another one until I’m sure the damn thing won’t break as soon as it runs out of warranty again.

I’m on a flight into London right as I’m finishing this entry. If the map is to be believed we’re just passing over Cork. It’s been an annoying flight, not quite turbulent but bumpy enough to keep me from sleeping, and I got stuck in a middle seat as well. But it’s almost over.

I booked a round-trip ticket from Copenhagen to New York City. This one has a stopover in London where I’m intended to transfer from Gatwick to Heathrow.⁸ I wanted to be in London anyway. So I’m here until Saturday,⁹ then moving on just in time to miss the coronation. Not a great loss, IMHO. Back to the grind.

Next: London (STN) to Copenhagen (CPH)
Prev: Toronto (YYZ) to New York City (JFK)

Footnotes

¹ When I left, it certainly wasn’t because I was bored with the city.

² At the start of my travels, I began working on an elaborate website to track my travels, in particular my visa restrictions. I included a way that friends could tell me where they were so I’d know, when I was nearby, that I might drop in.

Nobody ever cared enough to use that feature, and the visa tracking turns out to be a rather a lot of overkill; the only places I stay long enough for it to matter are Schengen and the United States. But I’m still working on it, and some parts of it have become essential. For example, it tracks whether I’ve arranged transportation or housing someplace, which is extraordinarily useful if you tend to arrange these things in fits and starts.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me at some point in the past five years, but there was absolutely nothing stopping me from jotting down where friends lived and incorporating it into the site. And I’ve now done just that. If you’d like me to drop in, let me know.

³ If you’re in larp circles, most likely one of your friends as well.

⁴ A number of banks refuse to mail replacement cards overseas, which can be incredibly inconvenient if you’re not in the United States on a regular basis.

⁵ Notably, both the knife (expectedly) and the fork (unexpectedly) had been confiscated from my set of traveling silverware over the past six months. I can get by without the knife, but there’s nothing like trying to eat a bowl of penne with chopsticks to make you give up pasta. I swapped it out for a wooden set.

⁶ If this sounds like the kind of user-hostile architecture decision that made me drop my Macbook in favor of a Framework laptop a couple years ago, you’re right.

⁷ They had some kind of promotion and gave me $475 trade-in value

⁸ In four hours, no less, which is very doable but annoying.

⁹ I’ve got an extra ticket to the Pentatonix concert on Thursday, if anyone knows anyone who’s interested.