A Familiar City in an Unfamiliar Land
It's amazing how at home I feel in New York. It's not that things are exactly the same - they are not - but yet somehow the 'melting pot' seems to take in every aspect of the other cities I've lived in and blends them into one.
In New York you have it all: the bustle and imperial grandeur of London; the brownstone architecture and flashy skyscrapers of Shanghai's east and west riverbanks of the Bund and Pudong; even some of the old world charm of Amsterdam, at least in the Village.
The subway took all of an hour to get to grips with, and navigating the grid system was a piece of cake. The ethnic mix reminded me of London too, though elements of Chinatown were, of course, pure Puxi.
Perhaps most of all, New York had that easy familiarity of an old friend I had grown up with - over 30 years of TV. Every inch of the city has been immortalised on celluloid, and it was as if I had never been anywhere else. Such is the impact of popular culture.
Lastly, the media. This place is self-obsessed. On any one of four or five rolling news channels today, the airwaves were jammed with non-news of Cory Lidl's unfortunate light aircraft crash into an upper East Side tenement block. North Korea? Fuggedabahdit.
On the other hand, strolling past Ground Zero on Wednesday did give me an uneasy sense of unreality. How must it have looked to those who witnessed the attacks? I imagined myself watching in slow motion as the planes made impact and realised just how much that day affected the national psyche of this place.
There are few Republicans to be found in New York, but they are not the only Americans.
