I can’t help myself: I love this city. I mean, it’s dirty, it’s over-crowded, there are neighborhoods in which you shouldn’t step into, and I’ve only been there for just one week, but still… I love it. But let me explain.
New York is also home to the United Nations, which has a school there as well, the United Nations International School. It’s solely made for children of UN-employees, which makes it extremely multi-cultural, but others than that, I guess it’s just school than any else. Anyway, they’re having a annual conference to be held at the UN building, in which they discuss current topics. For this, they’re inviting schools from all over the world to this conference. The Odenwaldschule is a long-tradition visitor to this conference, so I had the chance to attend this conference too. We were placed in host families instead of hotels, and so we had the chance to know some of the kids over there.
And this was indeed great. I mean, half the day we were just tourists, doing all the tourist stuff: visiting places, attending a broadway theatre, eating at a true diner (the food was bad) and so on. Nothing special to me, I don’t like this very much. But the other day, I walked around with my host Martin or alone, doing teenager stuff and so on. His parents were on holiday in Africa, he gave me a key to his house in Brooklyn, so I almost felt like I was living there this week, not just being a tourist. And trust me, we did a lot of stupid things. It took me only 6 hours after arriving to get drunk with Martin. Instead of attending a dinner, we prefered to play Basketball ’til 11pm. And we watched the changing colors from the Empire State Building on top of a 42 floor tall skyscraper, of course being totally fucked up. I guess I wasn’t a good participant when it comes to steadiness, which my teacher told me all the time, but I definetely had my fun. The remaining time, I was just walking around, not interested in all those great stuff, just having my target which I want to reach (most of the time either the UNIS school, the house in Brooklyn, or a Burger King).
It’s kinda hard to describe, but New York has it’s own mentality. There’s so much great to see, there’s so much sad to see, everything is a little bit bigger, greater, higher. I love it, and it’s a goal for me to eventually live there. I know, it will not be like this week, but it will be great.
