I’m in New York at the moment and I’m having great fun. I’ve never been to NYC for more than a day and this time, I really got to spend some time in the city.

I stopped by here on my way to Miami where I’ll be heading tomorrow for our annual conference The Spring Experience. Roy, a friend of mine from Utrecht is living here for a while (mostly because his girlfriend is studying here at Columbia University) and he’s shown me some parts of the city. My hotel is on Madison and 45th Street, so pretty central and I’ve seen the usual neighborhoods in the last few days (SoHo, East Village, Meatpacking District, China Town, Financial District and more of that). I’ll be going to Brooklyn tomorrow if I still have some time left.

Yesterday, Roy had his farewell party in a bar in Harlem and after a while, we got into a discussion about NYC and the attitude of the people here. Somebody concluded that you could somewhat compare it to the attitude of Amsterdam people. Just as Amsterdam people sometimes think Amsterdam is *the* city in the Netherlands and there’s nothing else but Amsterdam in the Netherlands, somebody told me many people in New York seem to think that New York has everything and everything revolves around NYC.

Well, I do not think that conclusion can be drawn that quickly, but what was more interesting was that, somebody gave an interesting kind of twist to this story. New York *does* have everything: the positives, but also the negatives and the fact that everything is crammed in such a small (well, relative that is of course) area is pretty interesting. If you walk up from Columbia University (main entrance) to say 124th Street, on left side of the road everything is pretty safe, whereas on the right side of the road (literally 100 meters away) you can find the projects; government subsidized housing. These are residential flats, comparable to the Bijlmer used to be like (well, actually, it’s nowhere near comparable, as the Bijlmer has never been as bad as some of the projects here in NYC are right now). The contrasts are very big and everything is very close to each other. Nice bars and restaurants on the one side of the road, whereas the other side is a complete no-go area.

Somebody mentioned that it’s an interesting city when you want to be confronted with those contrasts. It’s very hard to see the contrast of rich, comfortable and cozy Europe compared to dying Africa which is right underneath you. This was by the way the opinion of a student in on of the SIPA master programs, as I heard very much focusing on developing countries (so not very surprising), but there’s definitely something to it…

I like New York so far. Not sure if I could ever live here, but it sure is a city worth spending some more time in in the future or so. I’ll definitely be back.

No pictures yet by the way. I didn’t make a lot, but the ones I did make I can’t transfer off of my camera right now–I forgot my cable.