Autumn in New York, Long Distance Flights and a Slight Second "Culture Shock"
Trying to fall for fall in New York — travel impressions and thoughts about being a German in New York and what I didn't expect when planning a long-distance flight.
I have “seen” London, New York, and New Delhi like many tourists do — a short glimpse of a foreign place, hardly enough to see anything beyond the cliché.
When I first visited America, I wasn’t distracted by a common language yet. I had only just begun to learn it. Our school taught British English, and so did the radio with DJs like John Peel and David Rodigan. However, Hip Hop culture originated in New York, and so I felt prepared enough to understand American English when I bordered a plane to the states, decades later, in the early Autumn (or fall) of 2025.
Americans don’t fall for Fall in Autumn
When I said I was “taking the tube” to Manhattan, my American friends looked genuinely astonished. Well, that must have been the London term for an underground train then, which is known as a subway not only in New York but also in the Scottish city of Glasgow (where you can be part of the “inner circle” just by taking a train in the right direction).
Autumn in New York
Autumn as a season is “fall” in American English, but a famous American jazz song is called “Autumn in New York” because “autumn” has long carried poetic, romantic, and sophisticated associations in literature and music — especially in the early 20th century when the song was written.
Alligator on the Platform
My favourite misheard expression on the subway is “the alligator is in the middle of the platform”. While waiting for the elevator, I imagined an artwork of an alligator right next to it.
This artwork betrays the template that it was based on. Do your remember seeing this handbag or can you spot it in Tina’s Instagram feed?
One Autumn in New York, two different Blog Posts
I decided to split my travel notes into a personal things-to-do plus picture gallery blog post about my Atumn Trip to New York and this article on substack with my thoughts about intercontinental flight and unexpected cultural differences, following up on “delving” into Naija English when reading The Tiny Things are Heavier.
Jay-Z’s Footsteps
I accidentally visited the area where hip hop legend Jay-Z grew up, only to find a group of pensioners sitting in front of their project houses, a guy driving a Ford Mustang oldtimer car, and some occasional early signs of gentrification in the form of a hipster café that Google Maps suggested I should go to.
Maybe I’m closer to the elderly pensioners now than to the Gen-Z kids that probably hang out in the hipster cafés with their laptops and headphones. A generation that seems more adapted to surviving long distance flights as well. Worldwide travel and the internet still haven’t connected humanity as one and maybe they never will, as everyone seems so absorbed in their own bubble, shutting out the rest of world no matter where they are.
Long Distance Flights
Modern airplanes must be safer and faster than the steampunk zeppelin aircraft they had one hundred years ago. Intercontinental travel is still far from comfortable, and even the first-class priority passengers with the most expensive tickets didn’t look much happier than the rest of my fellow travellers waiting for a delayed flight to board. Maybe the most tiring and annoying aspects of flying are not dehydration, altitude sickness or jet lag anymore, but spending hours, deprived of sleep and patience, standing in queues and getting bossed around at the airport before entering a delayed and overbooked plane with too little space and too little oxygen shaken by turbulent clouds until everyone feels sick.
Finding cheap flights is less of a challenge than managing a long distance flight. Don’t overestimate jet lag prevention strategies, but if you want to sleep, bring ear plugs or noise-cancelling headphones and a sleeping mask and try to fall asleep before flight attends start serving lunch at the most inappropriate time of day. Do anything to stay safe and prevent getting sick, dehydrated or sleep-deprived before getting into critical situations at border controls or standing between taxi agents money exchangers or worse looking for newcomers like you. Take your medication in a small handbag or backpack and try to get rid of dispensable cabin luggage if there is an option. Melatonin has become a popular over-the-counter drug in the USA, but I didn’t feel any effect of chewing melatonin gums at all. However, my flight ticket included free wine in a brim-full paper cup that would have costed at least 60 dollars in Manhattan, and lukewarm coffee to tell my body when it’s morning.
The “Second Culture Shock”: Coming Home
I remember reading a book called “Culture Shock India” on a flight to Delhi a long time ago. What I didn’t know then was that there is a something like second culture shock when coming back home and seeing your old world with different eyes — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Back then, I found Germany to be incridibly silent, especially on a Sunday. This time, I had a related, but much more beautiful experience when our flight, that had been delayed several times, making us wait for hours at Paris airport without any glimpse of that city, finally made it to Berlin — a city that I had never seen from above in the dark before.
New York as a Sea of Lights, from a Distance
New York is a gigantic city that you won’t be able to grasp entirely, and from a distance, New York looks like a sea of lights below a departing plane taking off at night. Old European towns like Paris or Berlin, with their artfully composed structures of medieval parks and castles, look magical and sacred in comparison, in they eyes of a homecoming passenger that is still half asleep after a tiresome flight.
That’s it! Have a good time until next time!
