'Sploring

Ugh, I should have written that my headaches have *mostly* subsided. Am still not feeling 100% yet, but I'm getting there slowly.

Yesterday, I took advantage of the mid-afternoon sun to explore my 'hood and amble down South Broadway--a good idea with mixed results. First of all, the two cups of green tea I drank yesterday morning made me so jittery that I nearly had an anxiety attack while perusing the card section at a random Walgreen's. That's what happens when I drink caffeine after having cocooned myself in a darkened room for three days and subsisted on soft boiled eggs and spinach.

Second, maybe it was the lingering effects of the extreme caffeination, but I felt strangely uneasy during most of my foray into new territory. South Broadway is an up and coming neighborhood, equally dotted with empty storefronts, vintage furniture and clothing stores, used book shops, bars, tattoo parlors, and a few leftover adult video stores further on down the road. It seems like the kind of place that would get a decent amount of foot traffic, but the street was almost completely deserted, save for the clearly deranged homeless guy who accosted me looking to bum a cigarette and a few other shifty-eyed characters. I tried to shrug off my nerves and kept on about my business, moseying over to Michelangelo's for some chamomile tea, after which I poked around a Nepalese clothing store and had a lovely chat with an herbalist at her aromatherapy/massage/herbal medicine shop. She told me that when she started out on South Broadway back in the eighties, it was not a place where one would feel safe walking alone.

The area has changed a lot since then, and parts of the neighborhood give off a funky East Village/Lower East Side kind of vibe. While I suppose it could still be described as one of the grittier streets of Denver, I feel like I should have been in my element there, me with my oversized, rose colored sunglasses, my Stephen Colbert tote bag and, depending on my mood, a scowl of suspicious indifference plastered across my face. I may not be a fan of hipsters, but I do love me some vintage furniture and quirky boutiques and street art and dive bars. But truth be told, I felt safer in the Village, wandering through Washington Square Park at night and being offered dime bags than I did on South Broadway at two o'clock in the afternoon. According to the herbalist, the place comes to life in the summers and evenings; I just ventured out too early in the day, well before the hipsters had come out to play. And I suppose the LES and the Village were more gentrified than I'd realized at the time, but it's still strange to me that I felt safer in NYC than I do here.

Part of me wonders if I should have rented an apartment in a more sanitized, yuppi-fied downtown area like Lodo or nearer to the 16th Street Mall. But to me, that'd be like living next to the neon signs and corporate retail chains of Times Square. I've always loved the idiosyncrasies of the Village and the Lower East--the independent bookstores and pharmacies, the diversity of foods, the eccentric characters still inhabiting their blocks. And here in the heart of Denver, I love the restaurants and stores and bars where my friend CT has taken me. The wood floors and Art Deco charm of my apartment. The old mansions and tree lined streets of Capitol Hill. So why do I feel so paranoid about my safety here? I guess I still need to readjust to city living. And re-up my caffeine intake more gradually.