The City – New York

The city itself is very interesting especially if you are not used to the American architectures. All the streets are straight and perpendicular to each other which makes navigation a breeze. The old buildings are nice and interesting and everything is big.

The down side of such a big city is that you can’t keep it clean, by the looks of it. There was this bad smell almost everywhere from all the thrash (bags) that are usually just left in the middle of sidewalks.

There are some neighbourhoods that look almost like scenes from a criminal movie. Dark, narrow with old abandoned buildings. From time to time you can see an empty loft with overgrown grass and vegetation – almost like some jungle between the buildings.

The metro system – the most efficient way to move around the city looks old. It’s incredibly large with multiple entries and exits to a station with poor directions so we got lost quite a lot. There are a lot of stairs and narrow passages which makes it incredibly hard to navigate with large suitcase. The trains are old bug generally kept clean and full of people all the time.

People on the other hand don’t quite fit the traditional American fat guy riding a scooter while eating a burger with one hand and shooting a gun with another.  Most of the people in New York are fit and dressed well, the city is very very expensive, so the people who actually afford to live in it are in general very rich. If you earn less than 100k$ / year you will have very bad time living there.

There is this stereotype that the people in New York are rude, it’s hard to say if it is true or not, when you see them on the street they are always in a hurry running somewhere. If you ask them something they usually just ignore you. On the other hand there were two cases, where they just came up to us and asked us something, it’s even stranger because at the time me and Veronika were speaking in Slovene and I know they’ve heard us, but still they came to us and in one case asked us on some advice about size clothing and in the other hand a girl asked us if we would recommend some gigantic turkey leg from the grill, I’m still not sure how she ate all that thing.

Beside the businessman in the suits you can see all sorts of people doing all sorts of jobs, from jumping around half naked taking pictures with the tourists to the couriers who deliver fast mail during rush hour on bikes. I even encountered a hotel manager at the conference who came from Serbia and was in Maribor or Ptuj in the army.