Lessons From The Lone Traveller
The last week was filled with adventures and joy, yet again!!! I managed to travel around NYC (alone, bummer), Pennstate and Philly (it’s my second home now), met up with my good friends from INTEC and had a Thanksgiving dinner. NYC is a good place to walk around during the day and a tad eerie in the night if you’re lugging around a backpack; Walking around with my faithful brown backpack made me felt like I have this big sign that says, “Rob Me!”
The heart of NYC is pretty much like KL without the greenery scene plus a stupendous amount of buildings, and it was all too familiar for me which made navigating around so much easier. Navigating around Chinatown is hard, well, navigating anywhere outside the heart of NYC is hard. Chinatown is the spitting image of Petaling Street, maybe Penang but you get the idea.
My gravest mistake was not printing a map of NYC. Well, I didn’t plan on walking around NYC in the first place but yeah, a map would have made life easier. But that’s how I am, I have this tendency to jump into an adventure without planning ahead, I like the surprises and randomly spontaneous adventure I come across in my life.
Here’s what I’ve learned from my trip in NYC:
1. Subways, cops and curators are your bestfriends.
a. Subways serve as convenient landmarks to where you are, plus, they give out free maps. I didn’t know about the free maps so I took a picture of the maps they put up in the subway. Your camera can be your GPS, which I think is cool.
b. Cops? Most helpful and knowledgeable people around if you need directions to get to anywhere in NYC. They’re everywhere too which makes locating one pretty easy.
c. Curators? Same as cops but without the uniform AND they’ll suggest places you should visit. They also work as a mobile encyclopaedia, telling you the history of certain buildings, monuments, landmarks and even the history of NYC.
2. Hone your map reading skills
a. Doesn’t really apply to the centre of Manhattan but more of the lower and upper parts of Manhattan.
b. If you’re on a tight schedule, getting lost in Manhattan is the last thing you would want to do.
c. The subway map is missing a lot of information because they only show important streets and avenues, which can be very misleading. So what seem like a short distance is actually 4-7 blocks away.
3. Take lots of pictures as you walk (duhh)
a. And I’m not talking about self-portrait stuff, take pictures of your surroundings.
b. This would serve as a pictorial guide for you if you ever get lost, a convenient way to backtrack.
4. Always, ALWAYS, bring a fully-charged battery for your phone AND camera
a. Pretty much self-explanatory. Both devices are your lifelines, wouldn’t want them to die on you now would you?
5. Write down important numbers and always have small change in your pocket
a. Shit happens, things can get really bad and everything can go wrong at times. Yes, everything.
b. If your phone died on you, (happens to me all the time) write down the phone number of your parents’, friends’, whomever deemed important to you, and keep it close to you.
c. No matter how reliable or modern whatever electronic device you have, if it runs out of battery, it’s as good as a paper weight.
d. This is when the small change matters, thank God for public phones. This enables you to contact whoever you want to, get information from them and resume backpacking. ‘Nuff said.
My next post will be about travelling from Rochester to ANYWHERE. There’ll be review about a few transportation services. So watch out for that!
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