A-Train to the Beach...

The fact that you can just hop on an A-train and eventually end up at the beach is just another part of living in NYC that I never saw coming.  I mean, seriously....what doesn't this city have?  I never in a million years would have associated chilling on a beach with the New York City experience.  But after what most would say is quite a long ride by NYC standards (1.5 hours) Manuela, Ciara and I wound up at beach #98 or something like that, randomly picking a place to hop off the shuttle train and try to find a spot among the thousands of beach goers on Memorial Day.  The fact that they number their beaches is another facet of New York life which represents that stereotype that everyone associates with it-but I'm sure that beaches themselves have no place in that typical stereotype to which even I had fallen prey.  Luckily for us, and completely unbeknownst to us as well, a very nice and quite talkative lady on the subway let us know that it was the first day that the beach was even open this year.   On the beach we found that the temperature was much cooler than it was in the city, which was a huge bonus because the temperature on the streets is ridiculous at this time of year.  I can only imagine how much worse it will be in August.  The water and waves were nothing special and there was a lot of small seaweed floating in the surf, but the scene itself was real gem. 

The beaches in NYC are "divided" with these old
remnants of piers from the past--creating daydreams of
what life used to be like in America's busiest port.

But the thing that continues to catch my attention about New York is the diversity of the people who you find in just about any corner of the city that you go to.  On our way to meet Ciara in Astoria we happened upon a street fair full of food from all over the world-Indian, Columbian, Mexican, American, Greek, etc...complete with all of those places accurately and proportionately represented with people who actually come from those places.  Once we got to the beach, it seemed as though that very street scene had tagged along with us for the afternoon.

These kids were actually quite well-behaved--although
the one the right had some seriously ridiculous tatoos.

Now, that's not to say that there weren't a few drawbacks to the day that I hadn't normally seen in my travels elsewhere....For example, we saw what seemed to be a group of gang members and most definitely underage drinkers vomiting and passing out in the sand next to us, right in the middle of the several families and couples who had come to get out of the big city heat.  Or take for example the group of 20 young urban kids who shared the subway car with us on the way home.  One of the girls in the group, who couldn't have been more than 17 years old and wore a huge white and gold polka-dotted bow on her head (making her look like a rabbit) that decided she would get very pissed off at one of her supposed "friends" (who was male) for accidentally stepping on her foot as he passed by her on the train.  She then proceeded to push him and subsequently hit him over the head with a cane from another nearby passenger-right in front of more than 50 others on the train, some of which were young children.


However, the overall experience was something that I hadn't expected to find here in NYC...and I have to say that it changed my mind a little bit where I hadn't expected it to be changed.  But we have to take the good and the bad together--and as usual here in NYC there is an abundance of both.