A Colourful City – New York

New York is one of those cities that many people feel they know -- even if they haven't been there. Its trademark sky-scrapers have formed the backdrop to innumerable films and television series, (millions of words have been written about its characters) while its streets have been the subject of a thousand different songs. So what new can a correspondent leaving the city possibly say about it?

Well, the BBC's Stephen Evans can suggest that a Cuban café saved him from joining the September the 11th casualty list. Stephen is leaving New York to take up a new post here at Bush House in London:

Whenever people from Britain ask me why I like New York so much, I say: "It's the energy of the place" and they say, "ah, yes, the city that never sleeps". And I think no, that's not what I meant at all. It's not about clubs or bars or lights -- in fact, there's relatively little drunken carousing in New York.

Rather, it's the mental energy of the people, a wit and a wisdom on buses or in diners. People engage with each other. They're interested. They recount stories with wonder at the way we human beings behave, at the way the world turns.

I remember two classic Jewish ladies in Café Edison on 46th Street, a faded old deli that does a mean cherry blintz. They'd just witnessed, or so they maintained, a security man turn his back at a bus stop and his dog get on the bus without him, only for the bus to depart. "Well, did the dog have a ticket", one wondered. Facts, or near facts, in New York become stories.

It is a city where you learn the nuances of culture. I know now that Chinese and Hispanic people stand so their grand-children can sit on buses, something I, as a European, find shocking.

Above all, it is this cultural mix of immigrants which is so energizing. My barber is a Jew from Uzbekistan who speaks Russian and Persian fluently, the Russian from the Soviet Union, the Persian because the Jews were expelled from Persia centuries ago and they took their language to exile in Uzbekistan. He and I talk politics: "So what do you think of the war, then, Mikhail?" "It is a good war. Saddam was a beast and you must slaughter the beast to frighten other beasts". He said. We move on.

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