Miriam Traveling America 2015: New York I

One week in.

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I'm so distant from home and so I do things like use plastic and don't compost, I don't put the clothes back on the shelf after I try them on in a store, I don't try to find the mother of the baby in the stroller in the middle of the busy Manhattan sidewalk. I also am not fretting myself with posting vegan or animal rights facebook posts. In fact, I haven't posted anything other than "New York City" and that I'm looking for vegan shoes here, since I got here.
Today a bike rider got hit by a car. It would have made sense for people to stop and ask if the biker was alright; he got up after tumbling over, but may have been injured. Only the car driver got out and yelled at him. I didn't know what to do (where am I? What is this strange place?) so I kept walking, a little shocked.

Yesterday morning I went to a bakery\cafe a few blocks from here and ate a really great bagel with vegan cream cheese and an ice coffee. I think I'll go there again this morning. As simple as a bagel and cream cheese may sound, it was one of the best things I ate since I got here.

I've been eating all sorts of good vegan food- Candle Cafe, Jujube Tree, Masala Box, V-Life.

There are too many people in New York.
It's so bombarded with people that when I was looking for the number 558 on 7th avenue, I couldn't remember is 558 is an even or an odd number (to know which side of the street it was on) and had to go back to third grade and tell myself that the last digit is the one that determines if it's odd or even.

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I felt a little lonely because I sat in a food place in Bryant Park eating a plain and boring pasta-in-tomato-sauce dish in plasticware for too much money, and because there were Israelis sitting a few tables away but I was too scared to go over and ask if I could sit with them
And because, after all, I was alone.

And the guy who made the pasta dish accidentally mixed in fragments of other toppings, including chicken. I accidentally ate a little piece of chicken. And I had no one next to me to share my disgust with.

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I sat in Prospect Park. I was writing about my stomach ache (which I should have treated back home) and a dog in the distance was running for a ball its owner had thrown, and then ran back.

I sat and read more of the book "Wild" and remembered the evening I went with Shmuel to see the movie in the theater. The movie was so inspiring that I decided I'm going to hike the PCT.

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So, in two weeks, I'm setting off on the PCT
For 32 days.
I will be crossing all of Oregon, and then some of California, with 70-yr-old Bob and with 25-yr-old Cameron. I've never hiked for this long and with the weight I'll be carrying but I believe I'll make it.
Yesterday I bought most of the food for the trail at Costco. I'll go to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's to get the rest of the stuff. And I got all my hiking equipment in the past week since I got here. The package from amazon arrived a few hours ago. We picked it up at the Bakery.

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Oh. I didn't write yet about the Bakery.
Oh well. Next time.
In my next post: More about the food and supplies for the trail.

Here are some (too many) photos from the past week.