Americana

Observations from suburban New Jersey, 2000-2003

Crossing the pond

• "In England, a hundred miles is a long way, but in America, a hundred years is a long time."
• "When do you have Independence Day in Britain?" (A New Worlder forgets that Britain is generally the cause of Independence Days around the world.)
• mm/dd/yy, cellphone, parking lot, trunk, gas, store, line (queue), sweater (jumper), first floor (ground floor), checking account (current account), carport (garage), baby stroller (pushchair), track (platform), rental car (hire car), deductible (excess).
• In the UK, the Isley Brothers' "It's Your Thing (Do What You Wanna Do)" is the backing track to a Saab advert, but in the US, it's in an advert for NYC public transit (tag line: "Wherever Life Takes You").

New Jersey, The Garden State

• I woke up late on 9/11. Hurrying to drive to work, I turned on the radio and heard serious voices on every station. I pulled over to check the news on my cellphone and read these incomprehensible words: 'World Trade Center Collapses'. The trees were perfect green, the sky was perfect blue, and the difference between how the suburbs looked and how they felt was never greater. One way to tell, if you looked closely at the cars: every driver was on their cellphone.
• The parks of Morris County, Somerset County, Hunterdon County and NJ State.
• Odd but useful state laws, like attendants at gas stations and entitlement to free credit reports.
• Recognising where every scene in The Sopranos is set. Tony Soprano mentioning your town.
• 100 degree summer weather.
• 15 degree winter weather. I took my car to a car wash and the soap froze to my wheels, making them even dirtier than before.
• Real 24/7 diners that serve everything.
• The peace and quiet up on the mountain in Morris Plains.
• NJ residents are supposed to be within 20 minutes of three malls. I had four: Bridgewater Commons, Short Hills, Menlo Park, Woodbridge Center.
• My favourite drives: Madison through Harding to Basking Ridge; Route 525 from Martinsville to Mendham; Route 513 west of Chester.
• The swimming pool in my apartment complex, barely 10 metres from a three-lane Interstate highway. (Somehow, I never felt the urge to use it.)
• The Optimum Online cable modem service.
• $1.30/gallon gas (most of the time).
• Doing 100mph on the Turnpike at 5.30am.
• The annual Sussex Air Show.
• The fettucini carbonara at Champps in Menlo Park Mall...but they've stopped serving it now :-(

From the air (or, How I learned to love Newark Liberty International Airport)

• "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard this Continental Airlines flight. If Newark isn't in your travel plans, it will be in about two minutes."
• When landing at Newark from the north, you fly south parallel with Manhattan island. You can see all the way through the cross-streets, and count them down from someplace recognisable like the Empire State Building at 34th. For once, Manhattan looks ordered and tidy.
• I once took off from Chicago Midway airport at night. The plane did a full turn to head eastwards and there, as far as you could see, was a diamond-studded Chicago in perfect monochrome. Quite a difference from the sodium lighting of industrial Newark.
• In early 2002, we departed Newark and flew low over midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in broad daylight. This route was (and is) most unusual. The view of the tops of buildings was straight out of a New York aerial photography book.
• I always wondered about flying from Newark airport to JFK. Barely a week later, we had to land at JFK due to back-ups in the air at Newark...just as everyone thought we'd have to travel to NJ from there, we were cleared for departure to Newark and flew right over the Verrazano Narrows and Ground Zero. This must be the fastest ever journey from one NYC-area airport to another.

Travel

• You can fly thousands of miles and still see airport exit signs to I-80 as if you'd never left Newark. (I-80 runs New York-Chicago-San Francisco. Oddly, when referring to it as route 80, many Americans pronounce it 'root 80' instead of 'rao-t 80'.)
• The fountains at the Bellagio, Las Vegas.
• The view of San Francisco from the Marin headlands.
• Hilton's three-hour tour of San Francisco. ("This is Lombard Street, the second most crooked street in America." "What's the most crooked, Hilton?" "Wall Street, friend, Wall Street.")
• Bob driving us down Lombard Street in San Francisco while Shoshi talked on her cellphone to her mother in Israel. It's a small world.
• We went to see Dell in Round Rock, Texas. In the hotel rooms, a card read: 'Your maid may not speak English, so if you want anything, circle its picture on the back of this card'. Look out the window, and a mile away, Dell's campus HQ represents the other end of the income scale. (Although their buildings have the look and feel of a British sports centre circa 1986.)

TV

• 'Charmed' being on 17 times a week.
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, featuring Lewis Black and Steven Colbert.
• The way that Jay Leno's monologues at the start of the Tonight show are so much better than Letterman's.
• Endless infomercials on practically every channel after 2am. There was a time when I could recite the pitch of any and all of: Don Lapre's Making Money 2000, Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, Tony Robbins' Personal Power, Russ Whitney's America's Note Network, Barclay Financial's Options Trading, Teach Me To Trade, Carlton Sheet's No Money Down, Ron LeGrand's Cash Flow Generator (with the Rice Brothers), John Beck's Free and Clear, SMC Money Makers Live (with Tom Bosley), Internet Treasure Chest, E-Power & Profits.

New York, New York

• How much scruffier Manhattan's Streets are than the Avenues.
• Police officers outnumbering passengers at NY Penn Station during anti-war rallies.
• How unbelievably small Manhattan apartments are.
• Turandot at the New York Metropolitan Opera. With all the expectations of the best opera house in the world, the house still gasped when the curtain went up on the oriental palace.
• Getting lost in Manhattan one freezing cold December night, looking for the 42nd St Parking Lot. Eventually found it with the help of two police officers at the Lincoln Tunnel entrance.

License plates

• In three years, I spotted plates from 34 states: New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, Vermont, California, Utah, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Maine, Ohio, Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Kansas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Illinois, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Delaware, Tennessee.
• SUN SEA
• LOVESUN
• MASSAGE
• REENA
• APROVED
• NASDAQ
• IN2 ART
• AGENT X (on Ferrari 328GTS)
• BSS (but not on Bruce Siegell's car)
• BEAT IT (on a Jeep in Manhattan)
• A NOODLE
• BOXTER97 (on a Porsche Boxster)
• MDF (on a speeding Bentley Continental on I-287)
• GOP (on a TX plate outside the Department of Agriculture in Washington DC)
• PLTINUM
• EYE DOCK (Lexus SC430 in NYC)
• KRISTIN
• LAMO (on a Lincoln LS in Boston)
• HERBAL
• SOLO
• PEABODY
• FREAK1
• MINE 99
• H8 TO W8 (in the CompUSA parking lot in Edison)
• ANNOYED (on an Audi A8 in Manhattan)
• G (NJ plate on a Mercedes S-class in Manhattan)
• DOW 1 (Lexus LS430 in Warnock parking lot)
• DOW 7 (Ford Excursion adjacent to DOW 1)
• SNUFFLE
• BLAZN' SS (on the Henry Hudson Parkway in NYC)
• AAAAA (on a brown 80's Rolls Royce in Short Hills)
• GETAWAY
• SOUND
• SIR KID
• TROLLEY