Imagine having two weeks of freedom in New York City before the start of your senior year of college. Attending Fashion's Night Out, visiting Times Square and enjoying a romantic dinner in Washington Square Park. Mike Lee '12 experienced all of this in the period between his commodities trading internship and the start of Fall term. Yet while most tourists in New York take refuge in their hotel rooms at the end of a long day, Lee often ended the day in a sleeping bag on the streets of Manhattan.
For two weeks, Lee roamed the city with no money or shelter, relying only on meager resources and the kindness of strangers.
Lee, whose experiment ended last Sunday, Sept. 17, had friends periodically document his experience on camera, which has evolved into a mini-series on YouTube titled "Sleeping in Jeans."
"I have always wanted to do something like this, something that breaks the mold in terms of where I'm going and what I want to do with myself," Lee said.
For Lee, the most obvious ways to break that mold were refraining from brushing his teeth for two weeks, eating grass and ketchup as a meal and sleeping on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side.
"One of the reasons I did it was to cut out all the distractions I have in my life school, social obligations, family, thinking about my future," Lee said. "I don't mean that in the sense like I wanted to take a vacation, but I wanted to remove those things to figure out who I was as a person."
Lee entered the streets equipped with an old cell phone for updating his Twitter, a pink sleeping bag, a Flip video camera and a toothpick.
"I thought it would be a good way to meet people, and if they wanted to see how I was doing, I would tweet out my location pretty frequently throughout the day, so maybe they could come find me," Lee said.
The camera crew also developed challenges for Lee to complete, one of which was for Lee to barter the toothpick for something more useful, he said. Lee first traded the toothpick for a lighter, which he then exchanged for a toy airplane. He then traded the airplane for an umbrella, which was later broken in a storm.
"I didn't end up being that successful," Lee said. "The cycle ended there no one wants a broken umbrella."
While Lee faced many other challenges in New York, his first two days were the most difficult, he said.
"[They] were really hard for me because people weren't following me on Twitter, so I had to ask people to follow me," Lee said. "I also wasn't used to not eating very much, so I was hungry all the time, but after the first few days, I got used to it. I would have one meal a day and I didn't feel particularly hungry most of the time."
When Lee did eat, he relied on strangers to buy him food.
"I went two days where I only had chewy bars," he said. "This one girl gave me a box of chewy bars, and I had three a day one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner."
Sometimes the generosity of strangers was not enough, and Lee had to fend for himself.
"I ate [pizza] from the trash once," Lee said. "You would think trash tastes like trash, but it still tasted like pizza."
His greatest challenge, however, was loneliness, Lee said, despite the fact that he does not consider himself a "super social person."
"Sleeping on the sidewalk and eating less, I could get used to all those things," he said. "Not having people around was really hard."
Waking up alone and cold in the early morning proved the most frightening, Lee said. He slept in the streets, for the most part, as he was usually kicked out of Penn Station and public parks throughout the city. On one occasion, however, he managed to sneak into an apartment building and sleep under the overhang on the building's roof.
On several occasions, Lee was struck by the generosity of strangers. His one actual meal of the experience was a burrito purchased for him by one of his Twitter followers.
"I learned that there are really good people out there people who give unconditionally," Lee said. "I spent one night sleeping outside a CVS, and when I woke up in the morning, there was a bag of food next to my head. When [they] saw someone who was in need and [they] gave, it made me really happy."
Some neighborhoods were friendlier than others, Lee said. The people Lee encountered in the Financial District were among the least friendly, Lee, who is an economics major, said.
"People in Times Square are super friendly because if you go there at night, they are probably somewhat drunk, and during the day, there are all these tourists, who I would help take pictures of and talk to," Lee said. "Washington Square Park was probably my favorite because it is really close to [New York University], so there's a lot of students there, who are really interested in what I'm doing."
Lee found that girls were more interested in his project than guys were. One female NYU student washed his clothes and let him shower in her room, he said.
Unfortunately, Lee "was too smelly for a date," he said.
Lee also found kindness in the homeless population of New York. One of the more memorable moments of his journey was a conversation he had with a homeless man in Union Square.
"It was a big moment for me," Lee said. "It was just something else to hear his life story what he'd been through, what he thinks about the stuff I like to think about: religion, politics, jobs, family."
The most memorable part of his experience was the kindness others expressed in their conversations with him, he said.
"I used to be a cynic," Lee said. "But doing this changed my values as a person. I look at people differently I guess I believe in people more."
