THOUGHTS OF THE BIG APPLE

The thing about lying in a hospital bed all day long, is that one gets bored. Extremely.

I realised there are only so many hours that a even a self admitted couch potato can read or watch TV a day for several days running before even that pales. I was so glad to get the netbook for a few hours for alternative entertainment. I never did realise how connected to the Internet I am living for such a technophobe.

Thanks to the presence of HBO in the hospital, I didn't totally go bonkers on Singapore foodie programs. Not that they are badly done; in fact they were too well done for my present state of mind, or rather, empty stomach. I spent yesterday afternoon gorging myself on old Meg Ryan movies like "You've Got Mail" and "City of Angels".

These movies were, and still are SB's favourites. Not exactly mine, but I find them generally enjoyable and there are parts to admire. I'm no Meg Ryan fan, but I always considered Tom Hanks a thinking woman's sexy man. Watching "You've Got Mail" put me in a totally nostalgic mood, just like "Sex and the City" always does, bringing back memories of last year's wonderful trip to New York City. I would love to go back again, only this time, we would skip all the tourist traps and concentrate on slow walks in Central Park, coffee and cake and people watching in little niches, leisurely shopping in little vintage shops in Soho, a jazz concert, a night at the opera and a few more broadway shows. And little dingy second hand bookstores.

A quaint little bookstore somewhere in NYC where we found unaffordable first editions.

I like "You've Got Mail" because it involves bookshops. A quaint little bookshop like "The Shop Around the Corner" is what SB and I always dreamed we would like to run if we ever have the money and the guts to do so. Maybe with a little coffee niche. And selling more than children's books. But you get the idea.

Not that I don't enjoy mega book stores like Borders and Kinokuniya and the like. They serve their purpose extremely well, and any place that allows more books to be read gets my nod of approval. But there is something almost magical about smaller bookstores, especially those quaint second hand stores that we came across in New York City. Everytime we see one, we would dive into it, and be immediately surrounded by dust, the smell of stale books and the air of something. The bookstores almost inveterantly comes with an oldish storekeeper, who looks as if he had plenty of is own stories to tell, if only he wanted to, only most of the time, we were left to browse in silence until the dust got the best of us. The second hand bookstores in Singapore are too commercialised, and they mostly only have recent publications. In those NYC old bookstores, we felt that if we only dug deep enough, we would be able to unearth precious first editions. I am a backlist stalker. When I find an author whom I like, I like to collect all their works, and sometimes the earlier publications are simply impossible to find, except in shops like this. I love, love, love these bookstores, and I find it extremely sad that we do not have a single one left in our modern city of Singapore.

So I find myself getting a little involved in the story of "You've Got Mail" and feeling quite a bit for Meg Ryan's character in the show. I have to agree that there is just something that we cannot get from big commericalised stores. I don't think the two necessarily needs to exist exclusively though, and it is possible to have the best of both worlds. As soon as SB and I have got the necessary capital and get over the fear of failure (for me at least), we would love to give it a try.

In the meantime, I comfort myself a little with our NYC photos on SB's facebook page, and remember our aimless walks around manhattan having twenty cups of coffee a day just to use the toilets on the premises, the admiring glances that we actually managed to get (those tasteful tasteful men, haha), of walking the brooklyn bridge in the rain at 6 am in the morning before our early flight back to Singapore (because SB insists it is the thing to do in NYC, a la Sex and the City, though she didn't figure in the rain and cold).

We are city gals at heart, and NYC is a city among cities. We love our modern city home of Singapore, and we will be the first to defend her against any slander, deserved or otherwise. However, even we have to admit there is just something about The Big Apple, that makes us continue to lose ourselves in movies like "You've Got Mail" and such, just to indulge in that feeling of something different.

We will be back one day.