If you are keeping a “bucket list” for things that you want to do before you “kick the bucket,” add this to the list right away; lose yourself on the streets of New York.
Lose the watch, forget about work, time, stresses, and obligations, and let the spirit of New York wash over you for a couple of hours. Join the sea of people roaming the streets, submit to the lights, and let the mix of music and languages dazzle you. Feel the city’s heart beats under your feet, feel its sanity and its craziness, its angels and demons, fighting for your attention, fighting to make you whole, and yet to remind that you are nothing but a mere mortal.
There are cities that have a character of their own. They are not the sum of buildings and streets and people, they are the history, the struggle, the art, the ideas around every corner, conceived in every particle of air and water running around the place, engraved in the people’s faces, words and smiles. Jeddah is one of those cities, London is another example, and New York would definitely come on the top of the list.
I am writing this article just a few feet away from the Times Square, the crossroad of the world as some people would call it, so maybe I am under the spell of the city that I wanted to visit for so long, and I am visiting for the first time; you may find me exaggerating, or maybe not giving the city what it really deserves. In both cases, I would humbly request you to bear with me.
The soul of such cities does not develop over a night, it is shaped through decades in the hands of many people who love their countries and devote themselves to their cities. When a tour guide takes you on a bus discovering the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn and Harlem, going through Broadway and the Central Park, or when he takes you on a boat ride around the Manhattan island, passing under its famous bridges and watching its spectacular skyline, telling you stories about building and people and history, with passion and a sense of pride, you instantly feel how alive the city is. You find yourself immersed in the place’s history, and drawn to the smiles on the people faces around you. Cities like New York and London and Paris are examples of how modernity and history could come together, could live together in harmony. I am not sure the same can be said about the cities you love, if you are coming from the “Third World.” Sometimes, it looks like our understanding of modern cities is just to start over, to begin from scratch. In Jeddah, I am quite sure that there are millions of stories to be told about the city, its people, and its history, but where are those stories? Who can tell them and in what way?
Thinking about how many museums there are in a city with a history like Jeddah is an enough depressing thought!
Let’s talk about the people, about New Yorkers, and maybe about Americans in general, you can see the heavy weight of the city life on them; you can see it on the homeless faces scattered in the streets, and in the exhaustion and stress in the eyes of those working in the stores and shops. However yet, there is something interesting about most of them; they love life and like to celebrate it. The economy might be going up and down, finding a job is tough, keeping a job is tougher, but they are still smiling, friendly, like to sing and dance and chit-chat and have a good time. People you do not know, who are not even paid to greet and smile, would wish you a good night at the elevator, would ask you ‘how are you doing today?’ at the traffic light.
Maybe such small gestures are what make life, with all its burdens and obligations, bearable.
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@smaldosari
