Hello, New York!

Hello all!

If You ever heard the song by Alicia Keys, I tell You, everything she sings about it’s getting alive once You're in NYC. Marquees on Broadway, big lights, Brooklyn Bridge, concrete jungle…

Talking in general about NYC is not easy at all, but I’ll try to describe some aspects of the city. As I already mentioned, experiencing NYC feels just the same as it felt while I was driving my car on boulevards while playing GTA game.

Yellow taxis, policemen, traffic, crowded streets, magazine, tobacco and coffe shops, banks, companies, buses, huge projectors and lot of giant placards with advertisements, Klaxons, a little smog, busy people hurrying, Empire State Building, various cultures, various trends and styles, haircuts and faces. I won’t say by any mean that the aspect of a street and the people can be described as being uniform. On the one hand lot of business men elegantly dressed-up, on the other hand dowdy people. Different races with different cultures.

NYC is a mix of nations, traditions and habits. It has thousands of colours. The advantage of this factor is that these new impulses are amazing, seeing, or even talking with the people it’s a huge experience. This experience won’t ever be felt by the people who haven’t been out of their home-countries, or in the States. It’s admirable how colourful they all are, and how can they adapt and integrate and live together in such a melting pot. Analysing the population is not a boring activity in NYC. You’ll redefine Yourself, Your values and barriers, and the whole society. It’s a great psychological adventure. Unfortunately this multiculturalism has disadvantages too, because conflicts show up more often than in a unified land. The different scale of values, or the different language and mentality can always be source of misunderstandings. However, I will always admire how different people can interact and build something together.

But back to our little trip, NYC is a mass of avenues, streets and boulevards. They barely have real names, but are numbered (5thAvenue, 6thAvenue) and so on, which makes orientation systematic but also difficult. Public transportation can be easily understood (for details visit http://www.mta.info/) though.

Unfortunately we took the subway, so haven’t seen much from the city, but from Manhattan station we could walk down till our Hotel Pennsylvania ‘above the ground’, and could enjoy the view of Madison Square Garden, Empire State Building, Times Square and Broadway. We all forgot how heavy were our luggage, and took a lot of photos. The only obstacle was neckpain we started to feel because we always have to look upwards at the giant cavalcade of buildings.

We also walked by New York Public Library and Park. Comparing with Budapest, or Graz, or Cluj-Napoca (my hometown), there’s lack of green territories, people have to jog and walk their dogs on the streets. And yet we arrived at the question of lifestyle of the metropolitan. Trying to establish a healthy and balanced lifestyle in NYC is bigger challenge than doing this in most of the cities I’ve been to. Of course there are big parks, and pedestrian ways and bike paths in NYC as anywhere else in the World, but in my opinion, not enough. Harmony and calmness is harder to reach without nature.

Another big chapter: food. There are as many kinds of food as many nationalities living in NYC. Lot of fast-food, wrap, donuts, breakfast and brunch places, more carbohydrates, bakery products, and oily-fatty (flavor-enhanced, delicious) snacks, paralelly less cooked food, less vegetables and fruits. There’s a big variety of products for food intolerants and allergic persons, vegetarians and so on, but those are also convenience food or deep-frozen products, ready-to-serve foods, prepared previously and due to this, full of preservatives. I just call them plastic foods.

In central New York there are no big supermarkets, only smaller stores. Here we've been looking for fresh and crude vegetables, and fruits, but we couldn't find any EXCEPT TOMATOES, BANANAS AND APPLES. Sad fact that these are the only fresh foods. Furthermore, everything is previously semi-prepared, sliced and packed. There’s no modality to cut 100 grams of cheese from a cheese block, or to buy half a kilo cucumbers. Quantities are previously measured, everything is packed. They say, this is time-efficient, because you don’t have to wash and peal and cut the food in slices. Unfortunately, dealing with food here means only eating it, nothing more.

They are no soups (except the Vietnamese and other oriental restaurants), they are no pottages, no home-made food, so we were absolutely missing European cuisine. But we didn’t complain, because we already knew that in Rochester we’ll have an Italian cook. And I had to admit that NYC's breakfasts like fried potatoes, toasts, ham-bacon-egg-spinach wraps and pancakes are unbeatable. And from the supermarkets, I would highlight the wide range of vegetable crisps and reese’s peanut butter chocolate.

P. s. : Sorry for the quality of the pictures, I’m not a professional photographer.

Thanks for reading,

Dóra

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