Travelling Solo
I was excited about visiting and staying in Williamsburg for the first time. In my past visits to New York I’d always stayed on Manhattan. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to stay in Williamsburg sounded like a great idea. I’d heard it was a great people watching ‘hood. A hipster hang-out, easy kind-of-place to fit right in and meet the locals.
Sometimes when travelling on your own you are tempted to reach out for company. Seek out the person you worked with years ago who now lives in Brooklyn. Text the number your mate gave you of some bloke they went to school with who recently moved to New York.
The time I spent walking six blocks to the subway, riding three stops on the L train, and the very quick and yet painful 45 minutes I spent having breakfast with someone I didn’t like back in Melbourne all those years ago which made me realise I still didn’t like him, had wasted the start of my first Saturday morning in Williamsburg.
Why do we think we need company? Why do we dredge up contacts we haven’t seen for years in order to occupy some of our time in a new city?
Then of course I needed to go to Smorgasburg. Why? Because everyone in Brooklyn does on a Saturday. It came highly recommended by a close friend. Dutifully I went. I don’t eat fast food. I never do take away. Yet here I was walking another six blocks to get to an open-air park next to a sports ground, almost on the sandy edge of the East River, to browse and eat of all types of horrors of deep fried fast food.
The Bon Chovie stall was selling fried anchovies. Another stall was doing a roaring trade dishing out duck-fat fries. There were myriad donuts, drinks, ice-creams and pastries all high in sugar and salt and low down the food chain. I walked around, took photos to send to my mate and couldn’t wait to get out of there. Disappointment number two for the day.
Google maps told me I was only two blocks from The Wythe Hotel. I had been to its Ides Bar on the top floor once before in December 2016 while on a Field School trip with Monash University. It was a Sunday afternoon when I took the ferry with three of the student cohort across to Brooklyn. It was on my must-do-list. Great cocktails, great views, and great company impressed the four of us.
I wanted to revisit. Who said you should never go back? Well whoever it was, they’re right. It wasn’t the same. It didn’t have magic. It smacked of my desperation. The place was empty apart from the waitresses and me. It was disappointment number three.
The apartment I was staying in had a backyard with trees, outdoor furniture and a pergola overgrown with greenery. Quite rare for New York accommodation. Mid-Saturday afternoon, hoping my day would improve, I had the back door open, feet up on the couch reading the New York Times.
There is an open-air bar around the corner heaving with drinkers. The World Cup is on. Every now and then I hear a roar. Obviously, someone scored or missed a goal. It is welcome human contact without actually having to be there. It was a great comforting noise I didn’t expect. A surprise layer to this place I am staying in.
That is what going somewhere new on your own should deliver. Something unexpected. Something no one told you to go to. The things I saw, heard and experienced and the people I met by my own volition are what stay with me. You don’t have to fill up your days with places to go, exhibitions to see, people to meet. Just be in the moment. Ordinary people live here every day. For a short time I got to be one of them. That was my Williamsburg embrace.
Carol Saffer is an award-winning freelance journalist who loves a deadline and harbours a life-long obsession to write for The Economist. She is a CDU Alumni.
