I have a confession: Brooklyn is the part of New York City that I was the most excited to visit, but only because my mates and I are obsessed with Brooklyn Nine Nine. We had a fancy dress party for our friend’s birthday just so that we could dress up as the characters together and pretend to be them for a night. I know that it is filmed in LA, but I could hardly keep from looking for Jake Peralta as we rode the subway across the borough.

Coney Island (Brooklyn)

We took the train from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn to meet Amanda at Coney Island, a place that we’ve read about and heard about for our whole lives. I’ve seen indie films that feature Coney Island in the summer, and it is vibrant full of people. When we disembarked from the train, it was frigid with snow drifts and absolutely nobody. I caught a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, and it seemed to be a hundred miles away.

 

When Amanda, Andres, and I lived together, he used to tease us for having “emotional moments.” We love to stand together and stare into water (we used to walk the mile and a half to the Thames in order to sit on the narrow beach and watch the river waves), and when we found the sun setting over the water, we gravitated to it. It was an odd clash of worlds for me: my mum, the States, and Amanda and Peri. Do you know when you end up having the best of several worlds, but you don’t know how to process them all together?

The quiet descended on the way back to Manhattan as we began to cope with all of the discoveries of the day. And still, every time the subway doors slid open, Peri and I couldn’t help but call “Nine Nine” in the hopes that Jake or Rosa or Amy would hear us and come to shout “Nine Nine” back.

Brooklyn Bridge

We began dreaming of Brooklyn Bridge shots before we even arrived in the City. A painting of it hung in the flat, and Amanda posted a video of it onto her Instagram, and we began planning out our dream shot list. As we walked from a meeting that we had with pastors from all over New York to the bridge, we forgot to factor in one thing: the wind.

It was the coldest I have perhaps ever been. We made a decision halfway over to stop commenting on the bridge, and we would have grinned and bore it, except that our feet would have frozen off and fallen into the East River.

But honestly, it was so beautiful to see the bridge with the skyline behind it. And the flag waving above the struts was iconic. While I was happy when we got to Manhattan because the buildings cut the wind, it was still exhilarating to stand in the middle of the bridge and feel roar of wind and traffic beneath our feet.