I purposely pulled back the curtain to my room at the Carlton Arms (a unique hotel that I heartily recommend, particularly if you are a “low maintenance” individual) this morning at 4:00am. While I brushed my teeth, I scanned 3rd Avenue for signs of life—and it was everywhere. The bar and grill across the street was bustling with activity. A man with a large canvas bag slung over his right shoulder trudged south on the far sidewalk. The taxis, most of them occupied, zipped along the street and continued to intermittently honk at each other. Recycling and sanitation trucks roared past.

With envy, I let the white curtain slip from my fingers. I surmised that most of those people would soon be leaving for bed. Meanwhile, I would soon be leaving New York City.

My efforts to take the subway to the airport were again foiled and I instead sat in a taxi while the driver spoke on a cell phone for the duration of the ride. His phone rang not once, not twice, but three times during the drive—all during the 5:00am hour.

Who is he talking to? I wondered. Are they all other cab drivers?

A few hours earlier, I had joined my cousin and his friends for dinner at an all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink sushi restaurant. We did not indulge in the all-you-can-drink offer (for two hours at the ridiculous price of $10), though the other party in the restaurant did. This is why it was necessary for us to shout at each other over dinner.

One of the women at the table (a banker) was born and raised in New York and, after she made rapid introductory inquiries (”where are you from? where did you go to school? what do you do now?”), she remarked, “I could totally tell that you are West Coast the moment you walked through the door.” Before I could ask for clarification as to what made me so obviously “West Coast”, she continued, “I don’t think I could live in Southern California—no offense, but I’m too real for Los Angeles.”

Uh huh.

What followed was a confession that she wanted to get out of New York City. She felt that she was too intense and wanted to “go somewhere chill”.

“I want to discover a new place,” she wistfully said, albeit at a fast pace. “Kinda like the way you want to come to New York City.”

I nodded and offered my relaxed West Coast smile. The hastiness and mild irritability of New Yorkers had amused me all week: What about the truck driver who, upon realizing that traffic was not moving, continuously applied pressure to his car horn such that it blared for over a sixty seconds? Never mind that he knew the cause of obstruction (a recycling truck trying to pull to the curb); he nonetheless felt compelled to inform the entire neighborhood of his frustration. I again suppressed my snickering and thought, How is that effective? Don’t you think people would move if they could? How does that specific behavior help resolve the situation?

Perhaps that’s too much of a West Coast attitude.

Before the suboptimal sushi supper, I wandered through the grand halls of the American Museum of Natural History (after admiring the fashions at H&M—that store is praised to supernatural proportions in Seattle). Prior to entering the granite building, I had absolutely no understanding of the greatness and beauty of this museum. I was immediately taken with an inscription on the main wall near the entrance:

Youth

I want to see you game, boys. I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground. Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to a successful life. Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

Theodore Roosevelt

Though I spent over three hours in the museum, I only managed to see two (incomplete) floors of the magnificent structure. I particularly enjoyed the exhibitions about Human Origins and the Hall of Asian Peoples. The Northwest Coast Indians exhibit was also interesting, as was the Hall of Minerals. (Can I sound any more dorky?)

I was unconscious (which means “sleeping”) for much of the flight home, though awoke in time to see the grey clouds of the Pacific Northwest envelop the plane. While the dull hum of the engines filled my ears, I peered out the double-paned plastic window and saw the grey waters of the Sound trimmed with thousands of evergreen trees. It wasn’t raining, but the cloud cover predicted that it soon would. The white Space Needle eventually appeared and shortly thereafter, I was on the ground, shivering slightly while waiting for my friend to pick me up.

While she drove me home through the familiar streets of lovely Seattle, I recalled something that an interviewer had shared with me a few days earlier. The interviewer, a white woman who was born and raised in New York City, had spent a few years in San Francisco. I had asked her how she had enjoyed her time on the West Coast before returning to Manhattan.

“You know,” she replied, “I liked where I worked, but I didn’t like the city. San Francisco just wasn’t diverse enough when compared with Manhattan.”

I looked at her with surprise. San Francisco not diverse enough? Really?

My friend and I watched the Caucasian men and women, all tucked into polar fleece with their hands shoved into the pockets of their hoodie jackets, amble along the Seattle sidewalks.

I was missing New York City already.