It took me five months to write this first impression as a New York resident. I feel like it probably should have taken longer.. I don't quite understand it as a neighbor. I can't finish rediscovering the magic I felt the two previous times I came here as a tourist., but there is something that tells me that I will. New York in the short distance is more complicated for me than it was when I contemplated and enjoyed it from the surface.
There are fascinating cities to travel to and worse to live in.. I feel like the Big Apple is one of those. Something was also happening to Rome, where I lived almost three and a half years, but In the end I forgive Rome for not working at all, let it be dirty and chaotic. I do it for its enormous beauty, its history, my blood and Italian partner, its angry people who amuse me and, likely, because I feel like it.
There are fascinating cities to travel to and worse to live in.. I feel like the Big Apple is one of those
New York needs tourist lenses. Or maybe I need you to forget that there are other better places to live, and I got used to the immense defects it has to enjoy its immense virtues. It's happening little by little. I remember when I came 15 days and I stayed in an apartment on the Lower East Side, A Manhattan. It was June 2015. I walked around the city collecting my drool. NY has something of a movie set, of invented memory in which you reach thousands of places where you were without having already been. I had a great time.
I returned in December 2018. There were colored lights even in the sewers, giant reindeer spitting Christmas carols, ice rinks with selfies-lovers, jazz clubs that smell like gravy sauce. There is no city in the world that competes with New York Christmas. “They are not lights, "They are giants", he told me while watching Santa Claus eating bagels.
And seven years later I landed at JFK airport, I recognize, with certain prejudices. I wasn't excited about coming here.. The four years I lived in Mexico, the 2015 a 2019, We travel repeatedly to the United States. We learned that Americans are friendly, but not enough to make you forget that they are not welcoming. kindness is appreciated, but it lasts until they give you the receipt and the returns. Welcoming is everything that happens after. And in America, with its grandiloquent name of continent, in the after it happens less. Maybe that impression will vary over time.. New Yorkers have a cool and cheeky attitude that amuses me.
We learned that Americans are friendly, but not enough to make you forget that they are not welcoming
My first weeks in NY I was in shock. I came from living in Bangkok where the cost and quality of life is unbeatable.. New York, compared to that East in boiling, He is an old man with elegant dirty and disheveled gray hair.. Except in the noblest areas of the Upper East/West Side, It's hard to differentiate New York millionaires from food delivery people: they dress the same. Maybe therein lies your secret. In vibrant NY you can dress however you want, Being classy means leaving a large tip at the restaurant rather than wearing loafers.. The social elevator works so well and so fast that those who go up and down the ladder do not have time to renew their wardrobe..
American society is extremely individualistic. Everyone is responsible for their own success and failure.. There is fear of hunger and there is hunger for success. In Europe, being ambitious has become a vice. If in a meeting of friends someone shows great work ambition, economic, is suspected of being greedy, of greed. Deadly sins in the old world. The European can afford to believe that success is having free time, enjoy life, a peaceful old age, travel a lot, read… Your work should be a hobby.
There has not been in history and probably there will not be in the future a development of the welfare state like the European one. The individual stopped being responsible for his defeats and became a victim of a Government incapable of giving him a home., education, health, pension, sports spaces, entertainment… As they told me in Beijing, “It is enough for a Chinese to have a house and food.”. We are not French protesting about everything. In China we say that in Europe the Government feeds the people, while in China if you don't work you don't eat". On the old continent, luckily, there is no hunger without a state behind it. A privilege that does not prevent hunger, avoid helplessness.
everyone is there: thieves, beggars, cool, impudent women, murderers, fallen from the last degree of abjection, in slums where they brutalize themselves with adulterated alcohol, spouting obscenities
In the United States it is diverse. It has been since its origin. This is a country of gold diggers. This generated the immense immigration of the 19th century.. It was gold, that was sought with claws, without rules, what made millions of immigrants from all over the planet cross the ocean. “Everyone is there.”: thieves, beggars, cool, impudent women, murderers, fallen from the last degree of abjection, in slums where they brutalize themselves with adulterated alcohol, spouting obscenities. and the debauchery, dishonor, The madness, misery and death are also there. and hell, that opens its mouth to swallow that putrid mass”, The writer Ander Izagirre remembers in his book “The basements of the world” that the 5 August 1852 published the newspaper The Call as a kind of birth certificate of a California where millions of people came to get rich by drilling land.
That ambition to obtain wealth remains today, although perhaps more than an ambition, it's a necessity, an obligation. In the United States there are 800.000 homeless and 36,8 millions of poor people who live with approximately 22 millions of millionaires. And in the middle of those two extremes, There is a population with the fear and illusion of being one or the other.. They know that being so is possible.
Last night he was right at my house having Shabbir dinner. He is an Indian friend we met in Kanha national park, in India, in 2022. We made a quick friendship. He came to see us several times in Bangkok. When he found out we were moving to NY, he gave us a thousand pieces of advice, and finally we have seen each other here, in your city, because more than 35 years that he and his family lived in the Big Apple. At dinner he told us how he settled here.
I slept in the same room with a mattress in the back, and to go to the bathroom I had to step over them
Born in Mumbai, and his family decided to send him to university in the United States so that he could have a future in the land of opportunities.. “I studied at a university in Ohio that was looking for immigrant students”. After finishing his studies, He came to live with a distant cousin and his wife, just Married, near New York. “I slept in the same room with a mattress in the back, and to go to the bathroom I had to step over them”. Then, He decided to leave the couple alone and in the Queens neighborhood a Greek family rented him a room on the top floor of their house.. “One day I saw in a newspaper that the manager of JP Morgan was winning 500.000 U.S. dollars. I, Wow, “I want to win that.”.
He then decided to find a way to enter the world of Wall Street., and ended up working hard to join a group of Jewish investors who controlled an important part of the market. From there, rose to the top job in investment banking. He earned enough money to own his own homes., leave your children in a very good position, and dedicate himself in retirement to traveling the world taking fantastic photos of nature in very distant places..
Shabbir is the American dream. New York demands and offers. “How do you see, Javier, that I spent almost a year working in Manhattan and made more money than in my career in Mexico?”?”, Norma told me, a dear friend and brave Mexican journalist. What medium did you work in?? “In none. I worked as a waitress in a restaurant and earned a lot from tips.”, he explained to me between laughs.
He has clean skin and the way he dresses and moves looks like he has lived a better life before.
The elevator remains. Go up to heaven or throw its occupants into hell. Several beggars live under my house. Someone shouts to remind themselves that they are not dead yet.. There is a woman that catches my attention. Dwells, now in summer, in some arcades. During the day she sits on her steps. He rarely asks for money, and when he does it, it is with a voice so low that it is difficult to hear it.. He has clean skin and the way he dresses and moves looks like he has lived a better life before.. Do not consume drugs, does not drink alcohol, but he fell into a well from which I venture that it will be difficult for him to get out. There is no state that is going to get you out of there..
It is inhumane to see how the empire treats its "losers". I have lived in South Africa and Mozambique. In Mexico and Thailand. All countries with great social differences and enormous poverty. I have never seen the degrade images, of lack of dignity, that I have contemplated with people who live on the streets in the United States. A trip on 2016 throughout California, the richest region on the planet, It was especially shocking..
It's hard for me to understand why a European would prefer to live in the United States.. But it is difficult for me not to accept that Europe's economic decline has to do with a lack of ambition. Ie, It seems to me that the success of the old continent is its possible grave. It happened to old Rome, and will happen to his heirs. The world is a jungle and the most voracious are the ones who prevail. It was like that, with that ambition, that Europeans dominated the planet with their ships full of scurvy, greed and misery crossing seas.
A Spanish executive has the salary of an Uber driver in New York
A poor American is incapable of dreaming of the protection enjoyed by a poor person in Spain. A Spanish executive has the salary of an Uber driver in New York. Europe and the US are the West, but they are completely different. Here you know that you need to work hard every day to survive. Housing is very expensive, healthcare a luxury, quality education a family debt, protection a rifle kept in the closet. Americans are still those gold diggers to whom no one gives anything, but they can get everything. Meritocracy exists, compassion does not.
“I've been here for eight years.. If on a Saturday afternoon I go out with my friends or boyfriend for a drink and I don't work, I feel bad.. I feel like I don't produce anything. “This is not Europe”, a young Croatian real estate agent told us. And why do you live here?, I said. The question gives me away.
