It's A Hell Of A Town

It's funny— people say New Yorkers are mean, and that's never been my experience. I mean, there are always a few rotten apples in the bunch, but I don't think people in New York are in any way rude or standoffish or anything, overall.

When I was still in school and I would go through the city on the way to returning home for the holidays (yay for Metro North!), I always had a particularly pleasant experience with people on the subway. That's right— people were NICE to me on the SUBWAY. Every single time I would drag my suitcases around down there, some lovely gentleman would come over, pick up my suitcases, ask me which train I was taking, and wordlessly transport my stuff to my destination. Afterwards, they would simply smile as I thanked them profusely.

Now that we live here, I keep having wonderful interactions with people— on the street, in the stores, in my neighborhood. My neighbors are a dream (quiet, kind, helpful), people actually engage me in conversation while standing in lines, and Adam's personable jokes and smiles are always met with reciprocal grins and banter, instead of blank stares.

Perhaps it's because people are used to people here. In Youngstown, most folks divided the world into two types of people: those they'd known since Kindergarten, and complete strangers. Outsiders were scary, and rare, too, since people don't often just up and move to the middle of nowhere. But here, everyone is a stranger. As a 24-year-old small-town girl with big dreams and starry eyes, I am the quintessential Manhattanite. This is a town built on poor, innocent young people who haven't quite figured out what they want yet, and it means that everyone is friendly towards me, or at least not particularly hostile.

People here talk to you when you want to talk to them, and leave you alone when you don't. And everyone has been so nice to us! I mean, it can't hurt that my husband is really good-looking (especially in Chelsea, the international home of the gay man), but still.

Y'know, I found the same thing was true of Paris; while I had problems with a few individual French people (and let's not forget the guy who tried to rape me in the alleyway while I was walking home), Parisians really weren't the American-haters I'd expected. If you were nice to them, they were nice to you. It seems much the same way here: if you smile, and nod, and say, "Thank you very much!" people will respond beautifully.

It could be that I'm just romanticizing my new home, but so far, I find it a very friendly place, indeed.