Whoops, forgot to actually push to the site, in case you couldn’t’ve guessed I have been busy with my internship :P. Multiple post dump time!

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but New York City is a big city. There are many skyscrapers in Manhattan (like the central island thing containing Central Park), all bunched up right against each other. The streets are long and gridlike, and sometimes the sun sets exactly in-line with them so you get to fully see all the dust in the air.

At least where I’m staying, the streets are relatively clean, only a slight amount of litter left out for the pidgeons. There have also only been a few instances of crazy cars (in bike lanes, taking lefts into walk signs) and for the most part because traffic moves so slowly anyways it’s pretty safe to be a pedestrian in that regard.

Ok but like how do you get lost when the streets are all numbered?

Great question! I’m not entirely sure myself! I have a hypothesis:

I usually navigate in relation to (non-sun) landmarks, and the buildings all occlude each other so that doesn’t work out.

Especially in Central Park, where there aren’t any marked roads you can see, it was exceedingly easy for me to get lost. Not just once, but twice, I went out for out-and-back runs there that ended up being out-and-out so I was double the distance away… Learned my lesson there and now I run with Google Maps :P

However, this is just my go-to navigation mechanism; surely attempting to actually see what corner I’m on would help me get where I want to go?

I keep forgetting to orient myself at intersections, and have easily lost orientation when taking multiple turns.

Especially with east-west streets, I’ve gone very long blocks in the wrong direction before realizing it (yes I know I could’ve just looked for the shorter north-south directions, but remember i am dum)

GPS/location services is very spotty.

… which doesn’t help with any of the above. I’ve heard it’s because GPS signals reflect off buildings and the supposed Wi-Fi/Bluetooth MAC address-based location services never really panned out like it promised to.

This Also Happened In Seattle

Oh yeah I should mention! The team I’m interning for had their calibration this week in Seattle, so I was invited along for expensed business flights and hotel :) Seattle is a neat city too (much smaller), had the best sushi of my life so far there.

The place near my hotel had street grids at 45 degree offsets from each other, navigating which was a bit funky. Overall, I did a lot better than NYC (only got lost once!), possibly because there were easier-to-use landmarks, and also possibly because I’ve gotten more in the habit of navigating grids.

I did not go up the Space Needle unfortunately, but I did go on the monorail and light rail which were cool. Seeing it and hearing good things about Redmond too is slightly making me consider west coast more… nah, east coast for lyfe 😤