The little things that are different always slip my mind as soon as they are not around anymore, or as soon as I have been here a little while. The light switches are the opposite way, many toilets contain a scary amount of water, everyone drives on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD…

That last item has seen me close to being skittled a few times. I suppose that since I was about three, I was taught ‘Look to the right, look to the left, look to the right again’ and training myself to do the opposite is taking a few days.

People are very friendly. The coffee, as an article we just read explained, is seen more as a necessary fuel than something to bother taking any time over. Although this is changing. Today I bought M a coffee down at Battery Point, and got directed to a hot flask with coffee in it, and a jug of milk? I felt the whole of Carlton give an involuntary shudder.

Organic meat is considerably cheaper. Public transport is a LOT better, and probably cheaper. Instead of an ‘all day’ ticket or a ‘two hour total rort’ ticket’ it seems to be $2 a ride – and you can buy in bulk. I could spend a month riding the subway to different places – and am already getting the squeamy feeling that our time here is too short and running through my fingers.

I am fascinated by the rubbish around New York. Everyone one lives literally on top of one another, so there’s obviously going to be a lot of rubbish – but they all use those Oscar-the-Grouch rubbish bins. The kind I remember fit men in Stubbies short shorts collecting when I was smaller. A lot of it is just in bags.

In SB’s building there is one old-school rubbish bin for paper and another for glass and recyclable plastic. They’re collected twice a week. This seems like very little to me, considering the amount of packaging that everything comes in. There are piles of rubbish bags on the sidewalks waiting for collection, although it’s all neat. I suppose it is hard to invent another system – there is no room to store the kind of wheely bins that we use, and even if there was, there would not be any access at the curb for a truck to collect them.

Two more things. Sunshine and water. People are far less concerned about sun exposure, if the kids at the playgrounds are anything to go by. And water is still seen as something fun, rather than a constantly dwindling resource. It’s kind of nice to see the play fountains going in the parks for the kids to play in – they’re set up with little drain rivers that you can float things down.

And today? We spent the morning in the park, and in the afternoon caught the subway out to the River To River Festival at Battery Park. Both mum and I had thought an outdoor percussion thing was going to be on, but it was stringed instruments…and M confessed a love of chamber music.

We looked down on Ground Zero, which just looks like a construction site the size of a whole city block. There was nothing to indicate what had been before. The ordinariness of it all was odd.

Small Z did well, as the day was a long one – it’s lucky that she loves the subway.