Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, or Life on Mars

I was swimming in the Atlantic today and forgot I had a 5-euro note in my back pocket. The waves weren’t crashing like the final scene on Point Break or anything, but they were certainly strong enough to whisk away, in a final symbolic cruel and cold European manner, the little that is keeping me afloat in a city that I often feel is completely backwards.



I can’t get a good meal in this town, because I can’t really afford to get one. Of the few restaurants that I have visited, on the whole, I could say I can cook better and faster than probably most or all of the kitchen. The service is almost always slow, impatient, and lacking in knowledge of their own nation’s food and wine. This típico restaurant scene can serve as a metonym for the entire service sector of Portugal. And of all the goods a country produces (be it in the agriculture, industry, or service sector), services seem like they should be the lowest on the learning curve and the most readably adaptable to any nation. The United States now depends mostly on the service sector for growth of its GDP, and we’ve got that shit down, at times to a fault. Portugal, likewise relies heavily on its services for its own GDP (for instance, tourism is huge here right now.) However, I have not yet received anything near acceptable service from any place I go to except for the two small grocery shops near my flat. The taxi drivers are cranky (which is typical anywhere), the bus drivers seem suicidal, the mid-size grocery clerks homicidal, the barristas are deaf mutes, the servers are currently (as always) on a smoke break, the bartenders, well they’re o.k. (but who wouldn’t be when you have constant access to an infinite array of alcohol?), the lifeguards (when they aren’t hitting on skinny blonde internationals) read the newspaper or take a nap, the doctors give you about five minutes then say, “how bout you just tell me which drugs you want”, the professors are brilliant, cultured, and hilarious (and of course are the lowest paid of any of these), and the black market, its alive and well (mid-day on the busiest street in my neighborhood some dude apologized after turning around and running straight into me and spilling half the bag of heroin (or coke?), he just couldn’t wait to dip into, on my t-shirt—I imagine this happens often.)


All of this makes me wonder how our dollar is trailing so weak in comparison to the currency of Portugal, the Euro. Although I understand most of the economics behind the multi-national Euro compared with the sub-prime loan, war debt, no longer internationally desirable, crushed Washingtons, I still can’t help but be at a loss when I feel like some impoverished immigrant in a country the size of Mississippi (and with an economy that seems to match.) That is why the following article in the New York Times yesterday made me spin a bit as I saw myself on the flipside of this new role reversal of Prospero and Caliban (I know this might be stretching the metaphor a bit far.) The following article looks at the pound/euro strength and its aftermath in our beloved Big Apple.

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From the NY Times August 3rd 2008 (About Brits in New York): “Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “but here, they’re like three parts Kimora Simmons and two parts Oasis, circa 1995.”


This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.


But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.


Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).


“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”


Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”


Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.


Manhattanites without Bergdorf budgets often find themselves working overtime — figuratively and literally — to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.


Jessica S. Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm who lives on the Lower East Side, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker, in part to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.
These friends from Europe and Asia “come over and play in New York like it’s Candyland,” she said in an e-mail message.



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Well my friends, I am not in Candyland. I am the thimble in a Monopoly game, and I just landed on the hoteled Park Ave. space. And though I must pay the ridiculous rent, I can’t help but feel I am somehow stuck in a Crackland version of Park Ave. As my 5-euro note slips into the fierce Atlantic currents, so go I.