City Language

Yesterday I stumbled upon a serious 7-page long Do You Belong to New York quiz on Time Out. It includes all the seemingly meaningless but nitty-gritty questions about living in the City, such as "What's the most you're willing to pay for a beer?". I have no clue how the score percentile would look like. My wild guess is that if you can nailed half of the questions down, you can live in the City happily ever after.

I didn't start the quiz yet. I even failed a random converstaion about DUMBO. When a friend asked me about the place I solo wandered last afternoon, what came up in my mind was that little cute flying elephant I adored in the kindergarten.

(If you already know what DUMBO is, you can take the quiz now instead of clicking in to read more...but if you don't, I'd like to babble a little bit further...)Thanks for continuing the reading :) Glad to know someone has the same question as me.

Well, DUMBO turns out to be the acronym of Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass!

After waiting for an hour and a half waiting for the best brunch at the Clinton Street Baking Company and getting the best pancake I've ever had so far, I took the F train down to Brooklyn, got off at the York station and wandered aimlessly towards the bridges. I remember seeing a big grassland at the waterfront when I was walking over Brooklyn Bridge one month ago. Now I know it's called DUMBO.

The weather was great yesterday. A lot of people laid down on the grass, enjoying the sunbath, taking picnic and chatting with friends, reading books, or simply taking a nice afternoon nap. Time to time a helicopter flew swiftly over the clear sky, as a common scene in the city, particularly along the riverside. Sitting on the waterfront grassland, you have a great view across the East River and have two bridges embracing you: Brooklyn Bridge on the left and Manhattan Bridge on the right.

Brooklyn really emerges into a lively neighborhood with the influx of young professionals, dream chasers, fortune seekers and all kinds of talents. Accordingly, the housing prices start to draw the rocket trajectory. Hopefully that's not going too crazy given the recovering economy.

There happened to be the famous Brooklyn Flea going on nearby. I took a quick tour through the market. It's much smaller than I thought as a common flea market, compared to the ones in Asia, such as Temple Street in Hong Kong. There were some good vintage-looking sales, from clothes to furniture.

Back to the topic today, traveling in a foreign country does not only ask you to consult a colorful tour guide, but also prefer you carrying an urban dictionary along with you, or at least a pocket notebook to jot down those encoded names that awaits for a genuine city language to be deciphered and fully appreciated. Don't get me wrong. The spirits, humors and personalities of a city all dissolve into the city language.

Allow me to borrow a tagline from National Treasure to end this post. Discover the city in your own way and perhaps you can rewrite the Time Out quiz one day.

In order to break the code, one man will have to break all the rules. The clues are right in front of your eyes.