Yesterday I arrived in New York. I will be living here for the next three months and see what happens. In the process, I hope to

• experience the city, this marvelous melting-pot of the world;
• meet wonderful creative people;
• work on my own projects;
• sort out my priorities in life, notably what and how I want to work.

To follow my adventures and my thoughts, subscribe to my blog or follow me on Twitter (@yangmeyer).

The flight

After five years of it being in service (six years since I experienced the low-altitude flight tests just a few hundred meters above my house in Toulouse), I finally flew on an A380 super-jumbo. I was stunned at how quiet it was. Silly as it sounds, the highlight for me was the console between my seat and the window, which provided extra storage space and a convenient place for my reading material. Other than that – and the spacious front staircase – it felt much like any other large modern plane.

At 10:15 local time, we rather ungraciously “touched” down on 22L at JFK. “Bumped” down would be more appropriate, actually. Considering how low the massive inner engines are suspended above the ground, for a moment I was worried.

(Fun fact from a friend who works on the tarmac: SQ26’s layover at FRA is so short that they routinely have the fire brigade cool down the brakes.)

The welcome

America greeted me with fine weather (21 °C, or should I say 72 °F) and an unexpectedly good-natured border official.

After having heard so many nightmare stories from bloggers and friends, ranging from harsh interviews to permanent expulsion, I was a bit afraid to land with an abusive dick. Having quit my job, my parents living in Asia, and with a flexible return flight, I arguably could have had trouble explaining myself.

The immigration check was set up as a single queue, spreading to all 30+ booths, which meant that the nearly 500 passengers from my plane were through surprisingly fast. When I got near the front of the queue, an African-American lady ushered a handful of us to booth 22, then slipped in an Indonesian family of diplomats right before us and moved us to booth 19, from where I slid to booth 20 where strangely nobody was in line.

And this is how I got to Mr. Callahan, the border official (yeah, I am making this up; his name was Irish, though). He pointed to the fingerprint scanner and instructed me to “put four fingers between the rubber bands”. He explained that “people used to never get it right, they always put their fingers too near the edges. So I just put some rubber bands there, and there’s never been a problem since.” This was wonderful: gotta work with badly designed tools? Fix the UX affordance yourself.

First impressions

For the first nights I booked a hostel in Williamsburg. Since I wasn’t in a rush (I’ve got three months, right), I checked out the neighborhood first. Williamsburg is a wonderfully artsy/indie kind of place, with graffiti and street art like in Berlin or Valparaíso, cafés where everybody is working on their MacBooks, and shops where the first thing I see is Leonard Koren’s book on [wabi sabi].

Everything here, it seems, is taxed extra. The delicious bacon-and-scallion cream-cheese bagel isn’t 3.99$ but more like 4.30$. The 18.95$ book with observations on how a city works – 20.65$. The 0.99$ power cable I got for charging my Apple devices – 1.08$.

Funny thing is, people here don’t seem to take amounts less than a dollar seriously. At the bookshop, in my ignorance I handed over a twenty-dollar bill, and the way she asked for the missing 65 cents sounded like it would have been OK for me not to pay. (I did look through my pocket change and put the coins on the counter, but when I got to 60 cents she waved oh that’s fine and said thank you.)

I walked across Williamsburg bridge to Manhattan. The skyline is fantastic, of course, but in a way it felt strangely familiar. Must be all the photos and movies.

In Little Italy, I had a slice of pizza in a small underground take-away/delivery shack. It was amazingly delicious.

Diversity. From what I’ve seen, New York is by far the most cosmopolitan city in the world. The ethnical and cultural mixture of blacks, whites, Hispanics, Chinese, hipsters, “gangstas”, Jews, etc is so thorough that it would be impossible to discern at first glance where in the world this city is located. Paris has its maghrébiens, Berlin has its Turks, London has its Pakistani and Indian minorities. But here in New York, the very notion of a minority seems absurd.

Finally, some sleep

After only three hours sleep the night before, and with a six-hour jetlag, I was dead-tired, and I fell asleep at 6pm, and I slept for more than twelve hours.