Chirping birds and Christmas bells in the Greatest City in the World (part 1)

My friend Wanda once told me that Paris is “The Most Beautiful City in the World” but New York is “The Greatest City in the World”. I remember thinking “Of course she would say that, she is a New Yorker”! Still, I could not but agree with her because each time we visited the city, some of our favourite people in the world happened to be there! New York City (aka NYC) always felt like the gathering point for our friends from around the world - India, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Florida, Cuba, Romania, Hungary, Haiti… Only later did I realise that my friend was actually referring to one of the many nicknames of the city!

There are the well-known, administratively correct references to the city such as “New York, New York” (meaning the city of New York in the state of New York) or “The City So Nice They Named It Twice”. There is also the famous nickname “The Big Apple”, which has nothing to do with the fruit but with the term used by a sportswriter in the 1920s to describe the NYC horse racing circuit as "the big apples" of US competitive racing due to the large prizes available…

People also refer to it as “The Concrete Jungle” because of its skyscrapers, “The City That Never Sleeps” (the quote “Work less, live more” does not seem applicable here...), “The Melting Pot” for the wide variety of ethnic groups and languages spoken in the city and “The Five Boroughs” for the five counties that consolidated into New York City in 1898.

There are also some more pompous nicknames such as “The City of Dreams”, “The Metropolis”, “Gotham” in reference to Batman's fictional home, “The Empire City” derived from George Washington’s alleged quote "Surely this is the seat of the empire!", “The Center of the Universe”, “The Capital of the World” and of course “The Greatest City in the World”! And the list goes on...

The first time we visited NYC, we took the longest flight ever from Asia, flying back in time across several time zones. I still remember wondering how different New York was from the place I think of as its Asian equivalent - Hong Kong - where we lived at this point of our lives... The answer was waiting for us 15 hours away and back across the Pacific Ocean and the territory of the United States and, according to a friend of mine, was “very different”! And yet we found them somehow so similar!

To start with, Hong Kong has a much more poetic name than NYC. The city’s Chinese name means “The Fragrant Harbour”, referring to the southern harbour of Aberdeen where agarwood used for incense was exported from. However, similar to NYC, Hong Kong also has various nicknames from “The Pearl of the Orient” and “The Gateway to China” to “The Vertical City” and “The City of Skyscrapers”, and of course the more pompous “Asia’s World City” because of the mix of different cultures and international connections with the rest of Asia.

Another common thing is that both Hong Kong and NYC are cities where, with every breath you take, you will feel this almost intoxicating energy giving you the impression that you are a superhero and that endless and limitless opportunities are waiting for you around every corner at any time!

Before visiting NYC for the first time, I was always asking people what was so amazing about it, and everyone would tell me that it was the energy and the positive vibes in the air that filled you with excitement and almost made you want to fly… They were right! Every corner in the city seemed to scream “freedom”, “hope”, “anything is possible”, “sky's the limit”, “possibilities are endless”, “you can do anything you want”, “go for it, work hard, never give up and your dreams will come true”...

It felt like despite all its greatness, the city and all its 8.2 million inhabitants were always trying to reach for more... To follow the famous quote “I do not try to dance better than anyone else, I only try to dance better than myself”...

As if being the self-proclaimed “greater than any other city in the world” was never good enough…

(with the kind help of my friend Wanda Rene)