Discovering New York

Maybe destiny has brought me to New York City. (This is a poetic way of starting but, realistically, as mentioned, just my ex boyfriend brought me here!).

I didn’t want to go so far. London was my first idea- an easy two hours flight from home. I was scared of starting everything from scratch on the other side of the world. But, an eight-hour flight later, I was here in New York.

It took me a while to decide. But once I made up my mind, I left Italy with no hesitations, not realizing all the things and the people I would leave behind: family, friends, work, culture…

Everybody said: “ You are brave!”. But honestly my instinctive side decided that moving to New York was the right thing to do. I wasn’t really thinking about the consequences or about what I was going to do or to become.

My passion for growing and discovering the world was enough to convince myself that everything was going to be alright.

On my flight ticket the date: September 11^th 2006, scary-choice according to many, but I am not superstitious. I actually remember an empty – easy to find space to sleep – flight. I was traveling alone and I had a lot of time to think. My brain was spinning around and I couldn’t stop reflecting about the new life that I was going to start.

JFK airport was a first-juicy–taste of New York. The two lines for the passport control, USA and visitors, could give an immediate idea of who lives, stays, visit, or simply cross the Big Apple. Only few Americans were there; I was surrounded by hundreds of Asian, European, South-Americans, and everyone else from anywhere but USA.

And for the first few months I spent here in the city, my first thought in the morning, has been that here I would have had the opportunity to get in touch with so many cultures, religions and layers of the society; all elements that represent a great source to learn and improve myself.

New York, which is the city of dreams for millions of people, surprised me, and still does, every day. No matter what is your job, you will wake up every morning with a new, different challenge. And challenges are exactly what I was looking for when I hopped on my flight two years ago.

New York life is completely different from my life in Italy. Every single minute of the day is meant to do something. The first thing the I have learned about Americans is that, no matter what, you always have to accomplish your duties by the end of the day, because tomorrow you will be busy taking care of something else. In New York, where time has a different value than in any other place in the world, you have to get rid of your watch and spend as much time as needed doing what you are paid for.

My first teacher at NYU told me: “If you want come on the same page with Americans, you have to go straight to the point, because they don’t have time to waste”. My first thought after that was to buy a book on American culture and understand how it is that people and cultures get to be so far from each other. Americans don’t like talking about their political and religious positions: that is what everybody does in Italy. Americans don’t get attached too much to a house because the possibility of moving somewhere else can easily knock at the door: Italians usually choose the house of the lives in the city they like and they most likely will live there, doing the same job for their entire life. When I told my dad that I was moving to NYC, where working is an every-day experiment and challenge and keeping your job for more than three years is a utopia, he claimed that I should have thought about stability and consistency in life. But then he understood that America is the country of changes and mobility. I am enjoying that mobility on a daily base, building the capacity of expanding my skills and developing new ones. What did I learned? That I must go on through good and bad obstacles, that I have to find myself, smooth my edges. That I am the only person I can trust to reach my goals in life.

Do I like New York? I do. I love it. But I believe this is not a city meant to spend an entire life in. It’s hard to make friends here because almost everybody arrives, tastes the city and runs away. New York is fast, stressful and tough. Then there are those who decide to stay for a while, like me. Somehow I like the pace of the city because, even if it’s tiring and the days are infinite, there is always a corner where you can relax, breath the magic of a place, where everyone wishes to be, at least once in life, watching the skyscrapers in awe.