Of Relevance

I love bookshops. Even the pathetic excuse-for-ones in Pretoria are my favourite hangouts. So when in New York, I feel as if I am in heaven. Here, the book shops seem to have every title imaginable, spanning multiple storeys of floor to ceiling shelves. I could get lost in one for days.

There is a 3 floor Barnes and Noble a couple of blocks from my hotel. I pass it often, and go in at least twice a day. There is a small Starbucks on the top floor, and I sit and read, while my feet take a well deserved break from all that walking. Mostly, I stumble on the books. (A cover sells the book, at least to me).

But someone tweeted a link to an excerpt of the latest Guy Kawasaki book, and I was intrigued to see it in full glory. Now, the quantity of books in the shop can be a drag when you want to buy something specific, because how do you actually find it? Barnes and Noble have a novel (ha! a pun!) idea: there are computers all over the place, and you search for the book you want much as you would on Amazon. When you find it “online”, you click on “Show me where” and the screen displays a map of the store, with the exact location of the book. You can even print the “map” if you want to.

Stunning. I found the book in no time, and it seemed to live up to all expectations. So you would think that by making the shopping experience as painless as possible, Barnes and Noble are gaining a new client, right?

Wrong.

The 5 books I chose today would have cost me $111.84 at Barnes and Noble. But guess what? At Amazon.com they only cost me $72.10. So with free shipping and next day delivery, I still save $40.

And because Amazon have this built in intelligence where they harness other people’s shopping patterns, they can recommend other titles to me too, and I will probably end up buying some before final checkout. So possibly the total profit for Amazon is still pretty much what it would have been for Barnes and Noble had I stuck with them.

I don’t think this spells the doom of bookshops, of course. But it does not bode well for them either.

(Note: Had I bought the books at Exclusive Books, I would have paid R1,890!!! That means I got them at 30% of the price!!! I’ll save comment on that for another blog post!)

(What have I bought so far? Click on title for Amazon page – no affiliate sales here, lol.

• Stumbling on Happiness
• Nudge
• The Art of the Start
• Reality Check
• How the Mighty Fall

)

So I’m in New York.

I’m no travel noob, but there is something about visiting New York that is different to visiting any other city. It’s almost as if it is “The.City”. And in a way I guess it is.

Last time I was here (eons ago) I was a student in Boston, about 4 hrs north of New York. Even then I remember it took a couple of visits for the City to grow on me. At first I found it too haphazard, too busy, too lonely. But that soon changed. The energy of the City takes over, and there is a definite promise of potential in the air. I would walk past the 5th Avenue shops, knowing that one day they would be mine. My boyfriend’s apartment was slightly bigger than his bed, and that was great too, because I knew that that would all change when we grew up to be responsible adults.

So here I am, the responsible adult. With no apartment on 5th Avenue yet, and with great disdain of the shops that charge $400 for a belt. So at least the responsible adult worked out right ;-). As I walk the streets of New York now, impressed by little that is in the shops but more by the sheer energy and life of the place, I find myself wondering if I could live here permanently. I am still not sure, but I suspect the answer is “No”.

It’s just too busy. I think that that works in ones favour when one is at the beginning of a career, or at the end (with retirement). But in the middle, it must just be exhausting. Life is a battle here, that much is quickly obvious. People are focussed on money. Most conversations I eavesdrop are related to job security, money issues and so on. It’s on the people’s minds all the time.

It doesn’t help that New York is ridiculously expensive. To rent an apartment that could even mildly compare to my living conditions in SAfrica would cost about $5,000 per month. And I must emphasise “mildly compare” … that would get me 2 bedrooms in about 100 square meters, which is about a quarter of what I have now, minus the garden and pool. Kid’s school would be another $3,000 pm and the other costs are equally astronomical. A coke in a restaurant is $4, a movie $12.50 and so on. So the bottom line is…you need to be pretty loaded.

Of course, New York offers you the opportunity to get loaded pretty fast. Be good at what you do, and recession or not, you are going to take home the salary that is needed to pay those bills. My problem is that I have never been the salary kind of girl.

So in some ideal wish-I-wish-I-might world, I guess I could have an apartment here, and visit for short trysts of shopping and theatre, maybe a bit of business but always with the option of going back home. I wouldn’t mind spending a full summer here though, especially with my kid. She would definitely benefit from the very different cultural environment.

And I guess that is new York’s biggest pull: there is just so much to do here. You could never be bored…at worst you could simply be overwhelmed. In that ideal world I mentioned earlier, I would sign up for photography classes, explore museums, take up roller blading again, learn French, take some college classes at NYU…maybe even learn to cook. But I am smart enough to know that the reality would be far harsher, because the pace of life needed to keep head-above-water here would probably not allow me to do many of those things.

One caveat that needs to be mentioned: I purposefully wrote this before I had any business related meetings etc, which start tomorrow. I am fully aware that once I meet people in my industry, or potential future business partners my enthusiasm for the city could increase drastically. And if it does, I will note it duly here.

Photo by Sunsurf, via Flickr