90 Days in New York

In the summer of 2011, I had the opportunity to work in New York City as an unpaid intern for 3 months. This was great because I got to be in New York for a good three months. My joy was muted, however, because I was here – in one of the most expensive and exciting cities in the world – unpaid. However, I arrived here determined to enjoy myself and to experience everything I possibly could in 90 days. 

My primary motivation for writing this series is my recent realization that that I have spent a lot of time – and I mean a LOT of time – thinking about what to do in NYC. And about how to do it all at the lowest possible cost. Often, after having accomplished something particularly arduous (say, for example, waiting in line for free tickets to a Shakespeare in the Park performance for about 11 hours), I thought how much easier it would have been if people had told me the basics. Obvious information that no “Official Site” or “10 things to do in New York” list provides, but anyone who has actually done the thing in question would no doubt know. Equally often, someone passed along a gem – something truly spectacular to do in this city, and I feel it my karmic duty to pass it on.

New York is a wonderful city. No number of episodes of Sex and the City, How I Met your Mother, Gossip Girl, Friends, Will and Grace, 30 Rock (take your pick really) does the city justice, but they all provide a pretty great sense of what being here is like. As I discovered in my time here, it would be very hard to be bored in New York. You would have to try to be bored. If you are at all like me – enamored by the idiosyncrasies of American life – it would be even harder. 

This summer is my second summer as a poor, interning, foreign student in New York. Meaning, therefore, that I have done the preliminary round of tourist-like things: have seen the Statue of Liberty, have visited the MoMA and the Met, been blinded and had a migraine because of the shiny lights of Time Square, have seen the Empire State Building (to my eternal shame, I have paid for and climbed this monument at least thrice in recent memory), gawked at the Brooklyn bridge, gone to the Top of the Rock. NYC Pass would be proud of me. But one summer really isn’t enough, and I left last year thinking that there was a lot more I would like to do.

I must also warn anyone bothering to read this that I am very much of an easy-going generalist when it comes to travel and exploration. I enjoy watching a musical, eating a nice meal, the occasional jazz concert, wearing pretty clothes, experiencing a baseball game, walking through New York’s many parks. I do not follow any form of sport, music, or food obsessively. I say this because I have plenty of friends who find my hours of tireless research into what NYC has to offer endearing but useless. They are the cynics (those who are generally tired of all forms of travel and exploration, and would like nothing more than to bum around) and the experts (who know everything there is to know about some narrow sphere of human activity – movies, fashion, music, drinking – and really don’t care about anything else).

My following posts are therefore a carefully compiled list of what I did, what other people did, and what could have been done in the three months that I spent in New York.