My first week in New York City
Last week I arrived at the Newark Airport in New York City. Going to New York is fancy and all that, but now what? What do I do when I’m landed there? Directly diving into the city or drop of my luggage at my AirBnb first… I chose for option two and wanted to drop of my luggage first. So here’s how my first week looked like.
Trip to the Airbnb
Waiting on my luggage went pretty smooth. I didn’t need to wait long before I was all set and I could start thinking about a way to get out of there. Should I go with the famous yellow cabs? Ordering Uber? An airport shuttle or just the public transport or any other way I didn’t came up with.
I decided to go for the public transport for the easy reason that it’s probably the cheapest way. I took the Airtrain around the airport from Terminal C to the train station. This Airtrain is free and takes passengers anywhere around the airport. When I arrived at the train station, I took the train to NY Penn station for $ 13. Don’t get off too quick or you’ll end up in the wrong Penn station, somewhere in New Jersey.
New York Penn station is quite a big train station and in the beginning I thought you could only take a train from there. But after a while of being lost in the station I found the underground section. While I was on the train to the Penn station I looked up what metro’s I could take. I needed to take the C train to 14th street and there I needed to transfer on the L train to Brooklyn. Yes, my AirBnb was in Brooklyn, didn’t thought about that when I booked a flight to Newark.
Ok that said, being in the subway station I discovered that the C train didn’t drive at that time because of some work constructions on the C line. My first bummer. I checked again and I needed to take the C train for only three stops. Guess what? I just walk those three stops, easy! NOT, what the actual hell. Those were the longest three stops I’ve ever walked. It looks close on the map, but in the real life it’s a hell of a walk. Especially when you still have to carry your luggage of six months.
Finally arriving at the subway stop where I needed to transfer to the L train to go to Brooklyn. Happy me. Went down and believe it or not, also the L train didn’t drive. I was on 8th avenue, the last stop of the train, but he only started driving from 14th street because of some construction works as well. Fuck it from there, I didn’t want to walk an hour again for those new three stops so I gave up and hopped in a yellow cab for $38 dollars. Which I could share with the girl I was with, so my transfer costs from Airport to Airbnb were around 30 dollars. Not bad I guess, but could be cheaper if the subway would actually drive.
My stay in Brooklyn
As I told before, my Airbnb was positioned in Brooklyn. Bushwick to be more precise. The Airbnb itself was pretty nice. It was $15 a night and had a nice room, shared kitchen and public space with two bathrooms. There was no one living in the house. All the rooms were rented out to Airbnb guests. In my opinion, the house was overbooked. There were five rooms and in every room they tried to place as many people as possible. At current times we were with 13 people there. The table could fit only four people and in the morning you needed to fight for the bathroom. Luckily I was always the first one up thanks to my internship.
The first days we were there, there were also three other young students in the house. Some friendly Spaniards from Barcelona. They were tourists level 100 and were pretty funny and friendly. After the Spaniards were gone there were two Dutch guys in the Airbnb who were traveling through America. They had won some kind of hyperloop contest in San Francisco or LA I think and wanted to visit New York quickly before they went home.
besides the Spaniards and the Dutch guys, we never saw the other guests a lot.
First week commuting to ‘the city’
From Bushwick to my internship in Lower Manhattan I needed to commute an hour back and forth. Which was a pretty long drive. But both my room and internship were close to a subway station, so this was nice. I needed to take the L train from Brooklyn to Union Square in Manhattan. There I transferred on the N or W train, downtown to Prince Station. The L train to Manhattan was pretty crowded in the morning and I needed to sit on that train for 45 minutes. The yellow line (N or W) was less crowded but I needed to pick up only two stops.
You’re asking if I took the subway wrong in the beginning? No not even once… just kidding, I think I saw all of the subway stations in my first week. What was good, because I had an unlimited subway card…
Internship impression
I landed on a Saturday and normally my internship started on the first of February. Which is on a Wednesday, in the middle of the week. Every Monday, my internships has a breakfast meeting before they go to work and they invited me to come with them if I wanted. I was pretty excited about my internship so I didn’t mind starting a few days earlier.
I’m going to write a whole article about my internship and my tasks, but I knew from the beginning that my internship was going to be nice. But what I didn’t know is that it was going to exceed all my expectations at once!
Oh yeah, before I forget: It also snowed a lot during my first weeks in New York. Which was fun the first day. After that the snow became dirty and wet and wasn’t so much fun anymore. I had the luck to drag my luggage through the snow on the way to my new apartment.
Up next after me first week: Finding housing in New York and my ski & snowboard trip with Night Owls!
