There is nothing like the smell of a New York City subway. Walk 13 steps beneath the sidewalk on the first hot day in May and the odor will change your life. Sweat, condensation, sawdust, wet newspaper, pretzels and polyester. The air hangs thick and humid, saturated with dust so dense it creates a haze momentarily visible when the lights of an oncoming train pierce the blackness of the tunnel.
Getting from place to place in New York is about rushing, pushing and shoving. Dodging people, traffic, pigeons and garbage. Looking at one's watch without really noticing the time, and looking through, not at, passers-by. It is about the single smooth motion of sliding a MetroCard through the reader and hearing the click of the turnstile as you run to catch the shuttle.
Catching a UTS bus on the way to Cabell Hall is nothing like running through the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal during rush hour, and the average top walking speed of a flip-flopped Virginian hardly qualifies as anything more than a mosey. Life simply moves slower at U.Va. Cars come to a standstill at green lights and give pedestrians the right of way. Buses sit at stops until every visible straggler jumps aboard. Large gatherings never begin on time and ordering a wrap or a smoothie or a milkshake takes years.
But in many ways, the change of pace is exactly what a New Yorker needs after four years of Manhattan. It is nice to hear "please" and "thank you" and "excuse me." The occasional "y'all" is a definite reminder that New York is a 7 1/2 hour drive away.
So are people who ask me to say "Chawwcolate" or "How ya' doin'." It never seems to matter when I tell them that I only went to school in Manhattan and don't have any Italian relatives that live in Brooklyn. Ask me about what it was like to live in New York and I'll probably say something about eating canoles on a sidewalk café in Little Italy or ice skating in Central Park in February. I will mention the Met and the Guggenheim, the Village, South Street Seaport and the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
For New Yorkers who make the trip to U.Va., there exists the daunting task of presenting to others a worldview formed in SoHo or TriBeCa and not NoVa. Removed from the places that formed these views, it is possible to separate location from lesson and bring to the table the meat of what can be learned from time spent in a given region. For it is not necessarily the sight of the Empire State Building that a New Yorker in Virginia misses most, but the pride of being part of a city where such a structure is part of daily life. It is not the jumbo screens in Times Square or the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge, but the sense that so many millions of people have looked upon the same screens, the same bridge, and felt terrifyingly small in comparison to the world.
The bagels here don't taste like real bagels and the pizza doesn't even look like real pizza. Then again, one would be hard pressed to find good grits in Midtown, and I can say with confidence that there are no Waffle Houses on the Upper East Side. Here there are no subways or trains, and certainly no skyscrapers. But you can ride a bike without fear of being hit by a cab, and if you miss a bus then you can always walk to class. You can even make eye contact with people you pass because, hey, in Virginia people say hello to one another.
A New Yorker in Virginia will experience many new things, and re-experience old things in new ways. For what could be more Central Park than the Lawn and gardens? What could feel more like Giants Stadium than a touchdown at a U.Va. home game? What could be more like walking through the West Village than drinking coffee at a café on the Downtown Mall? In the end, location matters much less than feeling at home in a place that may be far removed from where you began, among people whose lives you would never have come across were you not a New Yorker in Virginia.
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