Colorado

So what have we learnt from spending three days in Colorado? Well, first it is bloody hot there! At least it is dry heat and not humid like here in Manhattan, and I got a decent tan from playing a round of golf on Saturday under the blazing sun. Thank you, factor 10 sun tan lotion…

On Saturday after golf, Leah and I had dinner in the Chautauqua park with another couple. Food was great and eating outdoor underneath the mountain was quite novel. We even saw couple of deers. When desert time came, we declined the offer and instead drove to Boulder downtown. After having a strode around Pearl St. Mall, we got ice cream from the Haagen-Dazs shop and consumed them (I had the Belgium Chocolate Shake) outside while people watching. With both of our friends, TJ and Jeronimo, moving out of Manhattan to Portland, Oregon, Leah and I were giving Boulder/Denver a once-over, completely hypothetical of course! The mall area is definitely quite cool, trendy, and full of youthful enery, but the rest of Boulder seems to be just another ‘generica’ with the same old grid road system and pre-fabricated houses and lawns. Our suspicion was confirmed when we drove to Boulder again on Sunday after the wedding. Seeing Boulder in the daytime also show us that it is not racially diversify. In fact, I was the one of the very few non-white people on the street and that’s pretty worrying. I dare think what racial stereotypes all those nice middle class white kids have stored in their heads. This extends to the less diversify culture. Everything is middle America, catering for white middle class family. May be we visited the wrong place but it is nothing like in New York City where every walk of life surrounds us.

Boulder was not the only place we visited, of course. After the wedding on Sunday afternoon we drove to downtown Denver, hoping to spend some time there to get a feel of the city. But when we got there, we realized everything was closed since it was Sunday and there won’t be much for us to see. So we spent about 30 minutes driving around the city, admiring the sights from the comfort of the air-conditioned interior of our rental car. The Art Museum is particularly interesting architecturally from the outside, but alas Boulder was more interesting so we drove all the way back there and stopped for a coffee and browsed the bookstore. I bought the An Convenient Truth which I devoured on the flight back.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the Rockies near Boulder, the rest of Colorado that we saw are vast expanse of bland and featureless land. Because of the heat and dryness, all the vegetations are the same colour of light green/brown. And I think that sums up our experience in Colorado thus far (though we realized that it is not wholly representative but nonetheless a hint of typical Colorado life), which is the blandness of the area. The blandness of population, the blandness of culture, the blandness of the environment, so on and so on. This just reinforces in our mind how interesting New York City really is and why we would probably never find another place quite like it.

Don’t get me wrong though, Colorado is great for visits and I will definitely visit again if only just for some great golf for reasonable price. But I won’t uproot ourselves from Manhattan and move there for good, that’s for sure.

Technorati Tags: Colorado, Diversity, NYC