New York

I'm not really sure how I managed to make it so long without getting to New York, that epicenter of cosmopolitan travel, that city of hopes and dreams in the eyes of so many, that almost mythical "it" factor that few succeed in describing well; New York City, the ultimate destination for someone as nominally well traveled as I seem to have become. Yet I hadn't, and so upon invitation to spend a few days in the city with accommodations accounted for, I couldn't turn up the offer.

Owing to its size, New York is many things to many people, and there are as many opinions about how the city is, what is good or bad about it, and what you should do there as there are people there at any given moment. It is the realization of the cliched American melting pot, a break from the comparative homogeneity of cities elsewhere in the country from east to west, a reminder that we can somehow manage to still be American even without segregating ourselves into cul-de-sacs and sports utility vehicles. New York is perhaps jarring to the content suburbanite but feels immediately familiar to the aspiring urbanite, the young professional priced out of the exact center of his home town but who passes most of his time there anyway. New York is your home town's downtown on steroids, regardless of the borough. It seems to never end, and what you make of that says as much about your background as of the city itself.

What is striking about New York is precisely that it is not striking; the immediate familiarity gives it a sheen of Anywhere, USA coating the sidewalks, the potholes, the peculiar beggars hollering down the streets, the tables of small and pretentious Manhattan restaurants that serve mediocre food. In fact, there is nothing remarkable about New York except that it is a city that makes an art of compartmentalizing, a place where you are free and have the resources to do and be whatever you would like at any moment you would like to, so long as you know what that is or at least have a decent reason for doing so. I suspect many of those who don't end up liking the city never figured out why they were there in the first place, they just expected New York to happen for them.

New York is a fine place to visit as a foreign tourist, but is designed in a way meant to be utilized and enjoyed to the maximum by Americans, newfound or taken for granted as birthright. It is not a museum of a city, the love at first sight that comes with the decorative lattices of Paris or the avant-garde edginess of Berlin. No, New York envelops you and lets you digest it before you decide what to think of it, before you decide what your purpose for being there is. New York will spit you out if you come to lack that purpose, moving onto the hoards of starry-eyed newcomers eager to take your place in it. The city is not boiled down into a Disneyfied garden, instead you are expected to know where you are going before you go there, right down to the paucity of signage in the subway. It is the quintessence of American dystopia, the idea we all seem to buy into of stark individualism and aggressive money-chasing while on the same hand forcing the less stellar reality into an unavoidable collective. It's fine dining on every cuisine you can think of and twenty minute waits for your subway train to arrive to take you to your underpaying job in a different borough. It's two-faced and unapologetic about that. The magic of New York, it seems, lies in its brash disregard for any imposed sort of order.