Walking: Not a Mode of Transportation

We are staying in a quiet, leafy street pretty close to what counts as “downtown” in Santa Cruz — Pacific Avenue plus a couple of parallel roads. We’ve developed the habit of walking downtown in the morning to grab a first-thing coffee, and it’s about 20 mins each way. Although there’s a bit of a hill on the way in, the walk is hardly taxing, and apart from when we cross Mission, there’s very little road traffic. But here’s the thing: there is very little pedestrian traffic either. Actually, that’s understating it — most mornings, we see literally no people on the sidewalks. It’s a bit like being in a zombie apocalypse movie. Usually there’s more walking action along Pacific Avenue during the day, and it can get pretty busy at weekends, but before 8:00 am it was pretty quiet too. All in all, a big contrast with Edinburgh.

We expressed our puzzlement about the lack of pedestrians to our friend Line (a Dane who studied in Edinburgh and is now firmly rooted in Berkeley). She summed up the situation neatly: for Californians, walking is not a mode of transportation. The other side of the coin? Driving and parking is super-easy across the whole of Santa Cruz.

We took the heroic route from Newark Liberty International Airport to our Airbnb apartment in Queens. Eschewing Uber and disregarding Google’s recommendation of taking an express coach, we waited patiently for an NJ Transit train that would take us to Penn Station. Once in Manhattan, we faffed around for a while trying to figure out whether the 7 was a bus or a subway, and were rescued by a helpful native who pointed us to the subway station around the block. (No, not where Google said it was. Bad Google.) Followed by lots more faffing while we tried to rack our brains and memories about how subway tickets worked, and why the Metrocard machine wouldn’t take our bank cards. After some more mishaps in finding the right platform, we were eventually aboard the 7 Flushing subway line. (NYC subway lines have their own Wikipedia entries. Who knew?) Turned out to be the 7 Flushing Express, rather than the 7 Flushing Local. So we overshot our station, and then immediately took incoming Local train one stop back towards Manhattan.

Apart from that initial total disorientation that descends when you exit a station for the first time and have no idea which point of the compass you are facing (thanks again, Google. Not.), we eventually found our way to the apartment block that contained the apartment that contained our “Spacious, Peaceful” Airbnb room. There we were greeted by monolingual Spanish Agustina, large dog and two cats. We did our best to make friends with all four.

Feeling frazzled from a long day’s travel, we ventured out at 4-ish looking for a small bite. Vietnamese sandwich sounded good, but the place we had identified didn’t feel right. So we backtracked a few stores to the Lao Bei Fang Dumpling House, which somehow called to us. Cheap, cheerful, and pretty full with Asian customers, despite the early hour. We both had enormous bowls of spicy noodle soup, chockfull with vegetables, some familiar, some like lotus root, not so much.

Replenished, we walked a big circuit that took us back towards, Roosevelt Avenue, the bustling commercial centre of Elmhurst. It’s narrow, it’s crowded, it’s full of life and colourful lights. Above it runs the 7 Flushing viaduct. Every two minutes, a train rushes through in one direction or the other, almost drowning out every other sound. But the locals seem to be impervious.

Why we liked Elmhurst? Just consider the demographics: 44% Asian, 48% Latino, 6% Anglo.