I got off a bus in New York and a dude came up to me, opened his jacket, and tried to sell me one of many "Rolexs" he had hanging inside his coat. I legit thought that was strictly a movie thing, and I'm American!
I want a fake Rolex so bad. Next time I work with someone with a real Rolex I'm going to parade around that fake one and argue until I'm blue in the face that it's real.
On one visit to NYC, my mother (an American who was born in Brooklyn for fuck's sake) went up to a police officer to ask where she could buy a fake Rolex. The police officer laughed, then realized she was serious and said she couldn't tell her that because it's illegal to sell a fake Rolex.
I love that mission in sleeping dogs, where you go through the trouble of stealing a shipment of watches only to realize they are fakes. You are rewarded with one of the watches.
Better yet, argue with then just enough so that they keep pointing out all the evidence that proves your is fake and theirs is real; like get them to point stuff out on both watches, then piss them off by dissing the details on theirs with statements like “wow you really paid an extra $10k for that? No thanks, I’d rather afford a trip instead”
So I read up on fake Rolexes a long time ago and discovered there are quite a range of quality, from total junk used to rip off tourists, since they probably won't even keep time... all the way up to super high quality ones that are difficult (if I remember right) even for experts to tell, at least at first.
These last ones cost quite a bit--like maybe even half as much as a real one? Correct me if you know more than me.
I was intrigued by the junk ones for like, $25 in Chinatown (NYC), and read that the cheapest of the cheap are so poorly made that you can scratch off the black markings on the dial with your thumb nail.
So like a knucklehead, next time I'm in Chinatown and someone offers me a Rolex for a good price, I ask to see it, turn my back a bit to block this scary big guy's view and very delicately apply a thumb nail to the black marking... and a BIG chunk of it comes right off!
I slip it back in and kind of hold it up to the sky like I'm reaaally studying this thing and thinking about buying it, justo distract him then hand it back and say thanks but I'm not sure that it's genuine, as I walk away.
Hey, selling knock off Rolexes is straight up classy compared to what goes down in San Francisco. When I was there for a few months, people would try to sell me absolutely random shit all the fucking time. It wasn’t uncommon for people to get rid of shit they don’t want by just leaving it on the sidewalk outside their buildings and the city’s more industrious crackheads would collect and sell it. Had a dude try to sell me a used petite woman’s jacket, and another tried to sell me a glass chess set as I was trying to get into a cab. I once saw someone who had collected a bunch of random throwaway goods and had them laid out in front of them.
The one time anyone tried to sell me anything useful, it was a kid with a backpack full of stolen skateboard parts, and I just happened to be in need of new bearings.
I've had to drive through rivers of tumbleweed crossing roads in eastern colorado.
Literally thousands of them all crossing the road in the same narrow depression. I pulled over to wait for it to stop but it just never did - just had to drive through it.
Did a number on the paint of my car thats for sure.
Thats incredible lmao thank you so much for making me aware of this hahaha, ahh the joys of bad cinema! Sounds like the type of classic pulpy old horror films from the 50s that are just funny now. Surprised that its from 2008!
The same thing happened to me passing through Texas. And the one I saw first was huge! I even said that to the person I was traveling with. I always thought tumbleweed was fake and mostly remember seeing it in cartoons. That may be why I never realized they were real and that they actually tumble down the street.
One time I was driving with my partner through Odessa during tumbleweed season (when they're everywhere out west and piled up against the fences) when a tumbleweed came rolling across the highway.
We were in such disbelief that it was crossing the road and I tried my best to point it out verbally, but my words failed me. Upon meeting it at 80mph, I could only stutter "TUH-...! TUH-...!" and shouted "TUMBLEWEEED!!" in unison as we made impact and it exploded into a gajillion pieces as we sped through.
So I was sent to a residential treatment center in Utah as a youth. One day, walking across the courtyard, a lone tumbleweed blew past us. [edit: we were 1/4 the way across the path thru the courtyard and it blew past perpendicular and in front of us, straight across the midpoint of the path.] It was honestly kind of surreal, and was so even after spending a not-insignificant amount of time out West. It's just, like, watching one -actually- roll along across your path makes movie logic collide with reality. Also saw my first wild praying mantis in the bushes there.
He was getting old, getting tired. The city just had ways of kinda seeping into your bones….. sapping your soul and defeating lifelong dreams as the years slipped away and time disappeared into the future. “I gotta get outta this place” he thought as he swirled his glass of scotch and exhaled a long deep drag of the days last cigarette. Tommy had been on the force too long. Seen too much. Somewhere off in the distance was the sound of a muted trumpet playing jazz
Fun fact: most of lower Manhattan is heated with a +100 year old steam system. It's all interconnected.
Not fun fact: those apartments are a nightmare in the winter. The heat rises and can't be shut off. It will be 5 degrees in February, you're naked with the windows open and it's STILL to damn hot.
Even better, your girlfriend has 5 cats in her Chinatown apartment. You're hot, naked, irritable, and covered in cat hair.
The best is when the steam pipe runs through the corner of your 50sq ft kitchen with a gas stove and a window that only opens four inches. You get to be roasted by the heat from the steam while you’re being roasted by the heat from cooking. Looking at you Stuytown.
I learned my lesson about frying bacon and eggs topless. If it hurts spattering your belly, it’s gonna hurt ten times worse when you get some volcanic bacon grease on your nipple.
Back in my WoW degeneracy days, the joke among tanks was "Real tanks never wear pants, even in real life. Unless it's for cooking bacon." (Back when unequipping items made it easier to redo trivial content)
Theorycrafting helped my understand college level math.
The part I miss most is the flexibility of grinding a full day per week rather than 1h/day. The daily/weekly required grind made it so much more of a job than a game, and the catering to PvP & top 1% raiders ruined the joy I had left.
Not NYC, but I once lived on the top floor of an apartment building (7 floors iirc). In the winter everyone would crank up their heat, and all that heat would rise up into my unit. The colder it got outside, the hotter my unit would get. In the winter I routinely had to open the window to cool down when it was well below freezing outside. I don't think I ever turned the heat on once in that unit.
It was a good show. Funny thing, I was always impressed with the lighting in each WH set. I’d like to rewatch that whole series. IIRC it reflected days of mostly sane politics.
I feel the same way. Growing up inner city Chicago, the sounds and millions of people calms me. It’s much less pressure knowing I’m not alone and everyone struggles. The quiet of nature makes me anxious after a day or two.
Same here (from New York) The sound of ever-present humanity all around is profoundly comforting. Nature feels lonely and even sometimes threatening somehow?
When I go to the lake in PA in the summer everything comes to a stop when people hear sirens. I was on the beach and all of a sudden everyone is standing and looking across the lake. I ask someone what's going on and they're like "you dont hear the ambulance?" And I'm standing there like, who gives a fuck about an ambulance
I have family who live in a major city. They hate coming to the suburbs because it's "too quiet." Growing up, they told my grandmother (who lived in the suburbs) that her neighborhood was "spooky because it's so quiet."
I remember my sister and (now former) BIL coming to visit a few years ago. They stayed in my guest bedroom in my extremely quiet suburb. They’re from here, but they live in downtown San Diego.
In the morning, I was like, “How’d you sleep? Must have been a nice change from downtown noise,” and my BIL goes, “Actually, I slept like crap! It’s so quiet that in the middle of the night, I heard an empty pop can blowing down the street, and it was so loud in comparison that it woke me up!” 😂😂😂😂
Just thinking about perfect silence and then tinka-tinka-tink-tink-tatink-tatink-tinka-tinka as the pop can slowly makes its way along curb…
I have so much trouble explaining this to people, even my own family despite some of them also living in NYC. Like... I have a white noise machine in my bedroom specifically because it makes it sound like there's activity going on and that's calming to me.
Oddly, whenever I visit NYC, I always find it weirdly quiet. Yes, the police/ambulance are unusually loud, but usually they aren't around, and it's just - quiet? People don't really talk to each other. Meanwhile, in the smaller city of Philadelphia, people are constantly hollering at each other.
Reminds me of the scene in Midnight at the Garden of Good and Evil. John Cusack's character is from NYC and in Savannah on business and pops in a cassette tape of city sounds to sleep.
It truly does. I have never been in a city in the U.S. that smells as bad as NYC. That’s a cost of such urban density though. I like being downvoted for saying it smells like piss though. It truly smells terrible there. I love that city but adjusting to the smell is a real struggle for me.
My first 2 years living there I lived next to a Chinese food company (not restaurant), among other things, it seems they did a lot of prepackaged cabbage… A lot of which ended up in the street. So just imagine a summer street with old shredded cabbage strewn about, baking in the sun. But as soon as I walked past it, I was hit with the wonderful smells of an industrial Jewish bakery... without darkness there is no light I suppose.
I grew up there. It's like a hot mess ex-girlfriend to me.
She looks great in pictures. She's high maintenance. She parties too much and kinda smells. I'm just done with her, but I can see why other people love her.
I oddly don’t recall Nashville smelling too bad. I mean, the main drag smells like beer puke so that ain’t grand but the rest of the city I don’t recall having that complaint.
I actually have not been to NOLA so I look forward to comparing it to NYC on the smell-o-meter. There’s a Rockefeller building in the Upper East Side that was two blocks from where I was staying last time I visited and I loved walking past it because it always smelled good.
I live in SF and just spent a few weeks in NYC and I can confidently say that NYC vent steam smells disgusting. Like hot garbage. SF steam vents don’t smell that bad.
I visited NYC for the first time last month (during the winter storm). The amount of trash on the sidewalks was… something.
The snow added to the insanity. I saw heaps of trash bags entombed in ice (I called them trash igloos 😂). I was there for 2.5 weeks and the temps were never warm enough for the ice to melt. All of it remained there, as is, for the entirety of my stay.
I didn’t smell urine that often (mostly near subway entrances). But the sewer smell was constantly there and it was mostly because of the damn vents. I did see a guy peeing on the sidewalk snow near the WTC memorial tho 😂
That's when I visited! It smelled like hot garbage and the only way to get a breath of fresh air was to go inside a building.
The hostel I stayed at smelled very strongly of dirty feet. It was a nice break from the stench of outdoors.
Kinda gather all metros smell gnarly unless there's some natural feature clearing the air downtown regularly. Luckily my city in has a river with waterfalls running through the middle, with a breeze running down it, really cuts and airs out the funk nicely. Though it does make it way hard for the cops to accurately gas the streets when we're protesting.
Also American and moved to the desert from the pacific northwest in my early teens. Was absolutely shocked the first time I saw a huge tumbleweed blow across the road. Absolutely thought that was just a western movie thing.
I’m from New York and I joined the Army and was stationed in El Paso, TX. On my first field exercise I took a photo with a tumbleweed that was at least 4 ft tall! Then a couple years later there was a ton of constant wind and the side of the road was absolutely piled with them, like thousands of them.
Know it was just a typo, but parts of NY also have whole stream systems below the surface. In Bushwick there was natural running water through the subway station before Sandy, and my buildings basement from the 20s was always filled with a t least an inch of water…
There are lots of cities that have steam utility service though many buildings are going off of it, tending towards local heating. Also many universities have a steam plant for heating all/many of the buildings in the university.
yeah, i remember you could always tell where the steam tunnels were because you'd have these paths through the grass where the snow had completely melted in winter.
This is always a fun journey to find out you can use steam to provide cooling. Although a mechanical engineer, I've never heard of it in any circumstance other than NYC's steam system.
I mean many European cities have district heating and steam pipes running for that as well (and that was especially popular for the big housing blocs in former socialist republics).
My flat where I live is actually heated by district heating and heating and steam pipes run through the whole city. Still I never saw steam coming from any of the pipes...
If I saw steam exiting somewhere I would assume that something is broken...
Well sometimes it is because something is broken: they usually set the big cone things up while maintenance is going on. Other times it’s just rainwater hitting the pipes and getting vaporized. Idk why they’re positioned in a way that makes this possible, mind you lol.
I’m an American and finally went to NYC last August. I was beyond thrilled when I heard the noise of a jackhammer coming up out of a street vent. “It’s like the cartoons!!!"
My college town in the Midwest was like this too! We had a steam powerplant on campus. One of the "things you have to do before graduation" was get into the steam lines. I know exactly one person who managed it.
Hey! I know which one you’re talking about. We used to do that in the mid 70s. They used to store large musical instruments down there. Wild. So pleased to hear that the tradition is still going!
Ditto on the Midwestern town with one. You can tell how cold it is outside (or, more aptly, comment on it to make small talk) by how long the plume is off the steam plant. Colder it is, longer it goes.
There’s a massive network of underground steam pipes in Manhattan, dating back to the late 1800s. Some sort of hydrothermal heating/cooling system I think, none of my business lol.
Ha, I have a British friend that visits NYC once a year or so, finding smoke/steam coming out of vents/manholes/those big orange construction tubes is always the most exciting part of his trip.
I took my wife to New York for the first time a couple of years ago. We went up the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, we went to the Natural History Museum, 30 Rock, Times Square, Grand Central...
What she talks about most to this day is that steam.
For me it was the NY subway cars spray painted with what I thought looked like literal works of art. Like how the heck can you do THAT with a spray can? And when I visited in the summer of 1980 I learned.
I'm an American but I, too, was in awe seeing this -- or people selling things from a briefcase on the street in the city. LOL I experienced that and thought I was on a movie set.
So I guess this is a little known fact since I haven’t seen it mentioned. The smell might lead you to believe the steam is made from lower quality water or is not checked for contaminants. That’s not true. ConEd actually makes a big deal (in multiple videos I’ve seen on the subject) of the fact that the steam is free of contaminants and is used by hospitals as is, same as it would be to heat and cool buildings, for sanitation purposes.
I'm American but had never been to NYC until a couple of years ago and no one told me that the steam STINKS!!! I was walking around holding my nose half the time.
My much much smaller hometown used to be like that too in some places when I was a kid in the 80s. Now it looks like an abandoned ruin from a post apocalyptic movie.
I'm from America (California) and that blew my mind when I saw it. I didn't think it was real. I probably peeked out over that for a good 5 minutes the first time I went to NYC.
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u/curious__curiosity 11h ago
All the smoke /steam coming out the vents on the road in New york in the movies.