The New York Log – No. 1: Hare NYC

The New York Log is our series of stories and secrets from the city that never sleeps. The transatlantic diablog‘s secret guest-editor reports… From the obscure to the serious and funny. All here.

Read the full first episode after the jump/below…

If you want to live in New York City you’ve got four possibilities: a) you’re rich b) you’re willing to commute for quite some time every day c) you’re willing to make a lot of compromises or d) you can live rent free in Manhattan, which means being homeless.

Since a) didn’t apply to me, d) is pretty scary and since I wasn’t willing to travel more than 30 minutes (one way) to university, all I was left with was c). Which in my case meant different things:

Sometimes I had to pay quite a lot just to live in a room that was about 85 sq ft. (about 8 sqm) and had a window looking at a building that was 1 foot away. Other times I had to share my place with an abundance of roommates and the walls were made out of 2 layers of press board. That was the case during my time I was living with Hare Krishna monks. I got kicked out of my former place at short notice and had to find something furnished in my price range, so I ended up staying with them for 2 months.

Tough times for me since they didn’t allow any fish, eggs, meat or alcohol in their building. But they kept their singing to a minimum and the incense sticks were mostly lit in their meditation room on the first floor and only scented the hallway. But my newly found passionate loving relationship to beef jerky had to turn into a passionate secret affair.

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