First Day In New York

It can be mundane, boring even, to experience something for the first time after you've spent a big portion of time anticipating it and thinking how would it actually be when it eventually comes. For the record, I will say that I have never particularly planned, at any point in my life, to visit New York because I desperately wanted to. It can be very fairly said that I wasn't anticipating New York - not at all. But it somehow happened that I ended up there.

"So, what do you think? Do you like it?" I asked my friend, Igor, a short while later, as we were doing our first steps in the city somewhere in the 6th Avenue, heading south, and after neither of us had spoken a word for quite a while, for clearly both of us were in a state of genuine shock for at least the first fifteen minutes after stepping out of the subway station.

"Well, I don't know," were his first words, "I can't see any Nature here. It's blocks upon blocks of buildings. Too much buildings, I think." 

At first, I thought he was serious. Could there possibly be a human soul that could fail to admire what I was seeing? But, at the same time, I couldn't help but sense a certain reluctance in his voice, as if he was saying something which he didn't inwardly believe in, which I took advantage of. 

"Well, you could say that people are Nature and, by which it follows, that these buildings are Nature too, having been created by them."

The day progressed and we managed, quite efficiently, to see so much in so little a time; it was undoubtedly, by far, the day we took the biggest amount of pictures in. I have consciously decided, however, not to include any of them in this post so as to symbolically convey how much I was astounded, and I still am, by what I have seen.

You might say that what I am writing is common knowledge, that everyone knows New York is great, that it is incomparable and that no human soul can fail to admire it. For this I say that I also knew; I knew that I was heading towards the greatest city in the world - but it didn't stop me from writing it.