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One of the things you learn from travel: There's a big, bustling, dynamic world out there! Also: never leave home, because you will be robbed.
I am in New York, where it took exactly 11 minutes for someone to try to steal me blind.
I landed at 10 a.m., took the train into Manhattan, then walked to the Financial District, perhaps to watch my investments vanish firsthand. Probably no brokers jumping out of windows, though; they're working from home, where they would have to jump from the second floor and would break an ankle at worst.
I hadn't been to New York in years, and walking the busy streets is a great joy in life. You study the old details of the bygone world, the crisp new signs of the world to come. You look up at the impossible skyscraper condos and wonder how they fill them up. A 50-story condo goes up, and it's promptly filled with millionaires. Another 60-story structure climbs out of a pit, and a year later it's packed with plutocrats.
There are two possible explanations:
1. There are more people with a lot of money than you can imagine.
2. The condos are actually enormous devices that capture members of an invisible species of rich people. Normally they float around in the air above us, looking down, sneering at our choices of brands (when they think of us at all, which they don't). But when a building isolates and encloses a space in the sky, they're trapped, and the only way they can escape is to assume corporeal form. You can't push the elevator button if you have no substance.
That's why the expensive condo buildings always have a high-price clothing store on the ground floor: It wouldn't do to see newly enfleshed millionaire ghosts walking naked out of the building.
Anyway. It was a good walk, but it reminded me how phones have changed things. Before, New Yorkers stared straight ahead as they strode and made no eye contact, because if you locked eyes, the other person would turn into Travis Bickle and start stabbing you. Or worse, ask for directions. Now they're all looking down, and they bump into each other, or clog the sidewalk. No one bangs on a car hood and shouts "I'm wahkin' heah!" if the car noses into the intersection; they just hang back on the curb, which is great, because that means more time to look at the phone.
After I dropped off my bags at the hotel, I walked some more, visiting some buildings that felt like old friends. Tarried in the shade of the Trinity Church Cemetery, where the headstones have been buffed blank by two centuries of indifferent weather. Tried to take some pictures of a beautiful, ornate office building lobby, but was told it was against the rules: "9/11," was the explanation. I don't think the towers fell because someone sneaked out some photographs of the World Trade Center's location, but OK.
At some point I realized I'd slept only four and a half hours, and it might be good to spend some time unconscious. Back to the hotel, where the room was now ready. Asleep in a trice, but it was fitful interlude. I was beset by odd dreams of being tormented by a buzzing insect.
Turned out that it was my phone, which had been sending me notifications in a constant stream while I was asleep. There was suspicious activity on my credit card. Apparently in one mad shopping spree, someone had attempted to buy ice cream, a ride on an electric scooter, dresses on an online site called "BooHoo," some crypto, invest in a real estate company and — this was the best — give money to the Boy Scouts.
The scooter ride I understand: Having stolen my identity, they were making a getaway! But the Boy Scouts? Was this some spasm of conscience, perhaps a desire to do something good while embarked on this spree of fraud? Perhaps there's a new merit badge in credit card abuse.
What does this have to do with traveling? Likely very little, but I had used the card to buy a ticket at the train station, and perhaps someone had inserted a skimmer in the official billet-dispenser. If that's the case, it's amusing to think I'd been in New York for about 11 minutes before someone tried to rip me off.
Well, I called the credit card company and told them I was not driving around New York on a scooter in a dress with vanilla dribbling out of my mouth. Today, anyway. Say, do they know how my info was stolen? They had no idea, really. It's just one of those New York things.
They may not jaywalk like before, but at least there are some who wish to uphold the old traditions.
