Eight times I’ve been to New York in my life so far, and I feel the relationship that I have (or had) with this city has taught me a lot about life. Today when I think about New York, I get mildly overwhelmed at the thought of so many people and so much noise, but back when I visited, I really enjoyed this city. But let’s start at the beginning.

My first visit to New York was in 1997 together with my mother. I was probably 12 or 13 years old, barely a teenager, and I definitely didn’t speak much English back then, because the village school that I went to didn’t do a good job at teaching me, well, anything, to be honest.

The reason I visited in 1997 was that my mother actually grew up in New York and still had cousins there that she wanted to visit. They hadn’t seen each other in over a decade, and I never met them. Well, my mother’s cousin (who I always refer to as my “aunt” even though that’s genetically not really what she was) welcomed us with open arms, and we stayed with her in her oversized house in New Jersey, and her honestly somewhat scary husband. She had the gift of making you feel welcome, and making you feel important to her, and we developed a really good relationship. Staying with her was awesome, and we used to go into New York City with her on the bus in the morning and explore.

In those visits, we usually also spent a couple of nights at my mother’s other cousin (brother of my “aunt”) and his family, and he was honestly the complete opposite. Absolutely unwelcoming with no sense of how to host guests.

This was repeated twice in 1998 and then for Y2K in 1999/2000, so twice I went with my mother to visit my “aunt”, as well as her brother and family, and their mother. Obviously I don’t remember a whole lot from these trips since it was quite a while ago, and they’re all kinda jumbled together in my memory. But a few of my highlights were seeing Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, seeing the Christmas special with the Rockettes at Rockefeller Center, visiting the Ellis Island museum, celebrating Y2K at my “uncle’s” house, and visiting museums like the Natural History Museum, the Met and the Guggenheim museum1. Oreos and Dr. Pepper were also something that I always associated with my visits there, and my aunt used to sometimes send me care packages of Oreos (because at that time, they didn’t exist in Germany).

While during my first visit my English was still fairly basic, visiting there repeatedly improved it a lot, but probably not in the way you’d expect. What I used to do there was to buy movies on VHS. Yes, those fat old tapes that you needed to manually rewind. And that actually required a special recorder to play, because of region locks. But those movies were a constant companion through my teenage years, and I used to watch them a gazillion times. And since they were in English, they somewhat helped me improve my English a lot. Back in those days, it was practically impossible to get English-language movies in Germany. These movies were, among others, The Addams Family, The Addams Family Values, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Matrix, the Indiana Jones trilogy, the original Star Wars Trilogy, and a few others. I still know them all by heart.

Despite this exposure to English, my school grades in English remained mediocre, probably because my teachers were so shitty. I remember that one time when I returned from my visit to New York with my mother, I pronounced “butter” with an American accent (i.e with t-flapping), and immediately the old crone of an English teacher said “we say [ˈbʌtə], not [ˈbʌɾər], we speak Oxford English here”. I think my enthusiasm to ever try to do good in English class died that day.

Visiting New York in my teens definitely did a lot to broaden my horizons, especially since I grew up in such an insular rural little village, where most people never traveled further than the next village. It gave me a different perspective of life and the world.

Then five years passed, and a lot of things happened. My aunt and her scary husband got divorced (apparently he was a cheater and also scammed her out of a lot of money), my aunt’s mother died, New York was struck by 9/11, my mother got sick for a while, I went through a pretty wild phase (as in partying hard), and all kinds of stuff like that.

Finally, in 2005, I was finished with school and partying and about to start a new apprenticeship in a new town. I used the time between finding an apartment and actually moving to go back to New York – all by myself. For a whole month I stayed with my aunt in New Jersey, and every weekday I would accompany her into Manhattan, where she would go to work, and I would go and explore the city. Then in the evening we would meet up at the bus and go back to New Jersey. On the weekends we went shopping in NJ together, or visited other people or family, or I helped her with stuff around the house, or we just hung out.

This was a pretty amazing time, because I could explore New York at my leisure, without worrying about time, or to some extend, money. I stayed with my aunt for free, so my only costs were for transportation and whatever I bought in the city during the day.

I explored almost every corner of Manhattan back then (except the scary ones), and I’ve been to most museums multiple times by now. One of my favorite things was to start walking up Broadway from downtown all the way up to Central Park. It’s a long, day-filling walk that takes you through a lot of different neighborhoods. I walked a lot, but always also spend plenty of time sitting on park benches looking at people.

Once I got settled in my new job and city, I went to New York again in October 2006 to visit my aunt, and again stayed with her for a whole month. Same process, and another great experience. During that time, she had to go on a business trip to Washington, D,C. and took me with her for 3 or 4 days, so I got to see a bit of that as well.

Another year and a half later, I took another trip across the Atlantic, but this time I did things a bit differently. Instead of spending the whole month in New York, I went there for one week to stay with my aunt, then I flew to Austin, Texas to visit my brother and meet my father (my brother was doing a post-doc there for 2 years at the University of Texas) for almost a week, and then from there I went all by myself to San Francisco. That was the first time I was truly alone in the US, because unlike in New York and Austin I didn’t have family there to stay with. I stayed in a hostel and explored the city for a week. Afterwards, I flew back to New York to stay another week with my aunt, and then back home.

Then different times came, and I was in a relationship. In 2010 and in 2012 I planned two more trips to the US and Canada, this time together with my ex. We stayed with my aunt for a week on each of these trips, and went to other places for parts of the trip. In 2010 we went to Vegas and the Grand Canyon, and in 2012 we went to Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Boston. Those were pretty awesome trips, but New York was no longer the focus of them.

After 2012, I spend all my savings on studying abroad in Australia, which was finished off with 2 months of traveling in Australia and New Zealand. So no funds for a US trip for a while… and indeed, by the time I had saved up for a big journey again, I had broken up with that ex, and needed to get out a bit… so in 2017, finally, after 5 years away, came my next journey to North America, in which I went to Toronto again (which I liked a lot more than I did in 2012), then to Kingston and Ottawa, and from there to New York.

I stayed a week with my aunt in New Jersey, but this was already when things noticeably declined, made worse by me having a bit of a cold. My aunt had developed a drinking problem over the years, probably partially thanks to that scary ex and everything he put her through. Staying with her became harder for me since every evening, she would drown herself with a bottle of wine. I tried to enjoy my stay there as best as I could, and the little time that I had with her. She was about half a year away from retiring (even though she worked way past her retirement age already)

Time passed, Covid happened, and in early 2021 my aunt passed away, just a few years after she retired. She was always such a funny, warm, joyful character on the outside, and often jokingly said “If I ever gonna stop working, I’m gonna drop dead!”. And she kinda did, sadly.

2017 remains my last visit to New York (though not my last to the US, since then I’ve been to visit my partner’s family in California a few times). I thought about visiting New York again for about a year or so, but whenever I look at the hotel costs, I just feel so incredibly sad. Staying there for a week would cost me around 4000 euros! Not even including flights! That feels absolutely insane to me. I was so, so lucky that I used to be able to stay with my aunt for free, and I feel like it’s just not worth spending 4000 euros to go to a city that I probably won’t enjoy anymore anyway these days, not to mention that currently I don’t really want to support the US economy.

New York will always have a special place in my heart. It’s such a fascinating place, being a melting pot of so many different cultures. Its history is still deeply ingrained into the city, and it’s fascinating to see old relics in this city, like businesses that have survived there for over a hundred years. But the city also changes, and I’ve observed it changing over the 12 years in which I used to visit it. Already in 2017, a lot of my old favorite places disappeared completely (like St. Marks Place for example), and I wonder how different the city would be compared to how I remember it.

Places change, but that’s not the only thing – I am also a very different person compared to my 2005 self. Back then when I was in my early twenties, I really enjoyed walking that crowded noisy city. You could just disappear there into the masses, and listen to the buzz that makes up the beating heart of the city.

Today, I’m not so sure how much I would enjoy that. I’ve become a lot more sensitive to crowded and noisy spaces, and get way more easily annoyed by those these days. My ideal vacation these days looks more like a hike in the forest than a walk in a metropolis.

One day, perhaps I shall go back and retrace my steps, but probably not anytime soon. Who knows how much longer that country will exist anyway…