Final thoughts

I feel that I should somehow bring things to a close here, seeing as I've already returned to New York. Although I enjoyed my stay in Prague, and appreciate the beauty here, I am quite glad to be going home. Prague is a great place to visit, but it doesn't hold me hostage like New York does. I would recommend it to anyone traveling through Europe, but coming here for an extended period of time is difficult. The city is small, and the historic districts even smaller. Once you go beyond the confines of the tourist part, the city is strange, and you feel that your are traveling back under the Iron Curtain, to some degree. Soviet-style buildings still stand, and even on the new buildings the architecture is bland.

Tourist-oriented Prague presents itself as a simple, slightly-medieval town.On the one hand, they are trying to hold onto their pseudo-medieval roots for the tourists, where the Czech people are content to drink beer, eat goulash with bread dumplings, and enjoy Berchovka. At the same time, they try to make tourists feel at home with Italian-style pastas, American hamburgers, Caribbean-inspired cocktails and English menus. Perhaps I'm sick of touro-centric culture, and just want to go to a place that feels like home. (See how diplomatic I'm being, family?)

Though, like Prague, New York is a huge tourist destination, the world beyond Times Square is the real New York. For me, it is this real, everyday New York that I fell in love with, and I can't wait to return to. The people in New York are not trying to emulate or please anyone (except perhaps each other). For all it's supposed rough-ness, New Yorkers are secure about their identity as New Yorkers. My mother has always said, "Everyone should live in New York for at least six months once in their life." I tend to agree. I am of the school that believes you don't have to be born in New York to be called a New Yorker. There is something inexorably and uniquely New York that slips into your bloodstream once you've been there long enough to accumulate it that gives you the right to call yourself a New Yorker.

Some may say I'm a bit too young, too homesick, too naive to claim these things are true, I will stand behind them. My heart beats in my chest just thinking about what it will be like tomorrow when I get out of the airport and onto the train, and then off the train and onto the streets. How can you feel such things for a place, unless you call it home? How can such an intransigent, constantly changing city be called home? Maybe home is where my heart is, as the old saying goes. My heart is other places too: with my family, my friends, but these are all pieces of the 'home' conundrum.

With peace,
Benny