The Lower East Side

You can see it from a distance. The different colors and the flashing lights. Words on signs just out of bustling shops that you just can't make out from afar. These are the things that draw you closer. But as you approach you realize that those signs that you thought you couldn't see properly were actually written clear as day. Just not in English.

You turn your head from left to right, drinking in the those new place. You can smell the salty teriyaki sauce wafering from inside a restaurant. You can see the people who look slightly different from you, with their different colored skin and strange eyes. They are talking quick, almost too quick to actually tell that they are communicating. It's just all so confusing.

You stumble backwards, trying to escape the unknown. The music changes and the architecture becomes more intricate. You hear people talking around you and you are ever so slightly relieved that they are talking slower. Barely. The words are written in letters you have seen before but you still cannot understand. It seems you have stepped through yet another portal from one universe to the next.

These two places, so different and so strange appear just feet away from each other. Connecting two cultures that, if just the slightest occurrence in American history had been altered, would have never been connected this way. This is what I have learned is what makes New York City truly magical in a way I had never known before.

Mae