I love a big city. I love crowds. I love being in an environment where people have an agenda, a place to be, and a purpose. I was privileged enough to spend the weekend exploring New York City with my best friend. The pace and the people are very different than in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City is a bubble. It’s clean and shiny and most don’t want to leave the bubble or do anything to make it pop. Therefore, the Utahns stay safe inside their bubble and learn little of the outside world.
New York is made up of a vastly wide variety of types. Things move quickly and the focus is different. Over one million people leave the city each year and another one million take their place. Change is all over and progression is at its peak.
Over the long weekend, we ate a lot of thin-crust pizza and giant cookies from Levaine’s then made up for it by walking twelve miles a day. We shopped our way through Soho and Union Square and rested our feet at Washington Square Park. We did the classic tourist stuff like riding the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty and walking the Brooklyn Bridge. We wandered through The Metropolitan Museum of Art then ran through Central Park. We envied over the elite on the Upper East Side and gave our leftovers to the homeless on every street corner. I loved every minute of it and wished I could freeze the crowded streets and speeding taxis so I never had to leave.
On my plane ride home from a great weekend of adventures I sat by Betty, an 88-year-old Utah native who traveled to Rochester with her four sisters to see the historic LDS church site where Joseph Smith allegedly discovered the golden plates. I have an entertaining habit of talking to elderly people on planes. If you exercise this habit as often as I do, you’ll come to realize most people have lived through incredible things and are thrilled to share them with you. I attempted to extract an interesting story out of Betty in order to make the five hours pass quickly, but after telling me about her little travel experience, her 29 grandchildren, her career as a mother, and her 88 years living in Logan, Utah, I wasn’t so interested anymore.
Perhaps I was too quick to judge, but from what I could tell, Betty had fallen victim to the bubble. She scolded me for being 21 and unmarried and fell silent when I spoke of my ambitions to travel. I had just spent five days in a city where you can be anything, love anyone, and do whatever you’re passionate about and here I was on an airplane, being judged for not following this woman’s idea of traditional Utah values.
It made me sad for her. It made me sad she had traveled across the country for the first time in her 88 years of living and didn’t even bother to see the lights of Time Square or the view from the top of the Empire State building. This world has so much to offer. Salt Lake City is a very bizarre cookie cutter place that doesn’t offer a great amount of diversity. It’s clean and friendly and the mountains to our east are absolutely breathtaking, but if you want to learn how the rest of the world lives, get out of Salt Lake City. Just for a little while. Everyday I am grateful for my opportunities to see the world and pray I get to do that until I am 88 years old. So the Subway is dirty and I have to hold on to my bag a little tighter, the good news is I can always go back to the clean little bubble in Salt Lake City, Utah.