having a typical NYC morning: -dog (pit bull?) being walked, wearing sunglasses -monk walking down 1st Ave -asked if I knew how to get to Riker's Island. maybe you're not a real New Yorker until you know how to get to Riker's Island(Riker's island is where NYC's jail is located)
To add my story also from Friday morning: walking to work, I stopped by a vegetable/fruit vendor on the Upper East Side. There were $1 boxes of strawberries! It was a really windy day and as I got my change back, a dollar bill nearly flew out of hand. This somehow triggered a conversation with the man selling the strawberries to me. He asked me if I was Turkish (this happened in English, so surely he didn't believe for one second that I was indeed, Turkish), no, I told him, I was from Hungary... "Szervusz, hogy vagy?" (Hello, how are you?) "Budapest is so beautiful, such a romantic city." Turned out he was a history teacher, gave me the short version of how Hungarians and Turks really came from the same place, we are practically the same people. Then there was the issue of do I want to go back home and the puzzled look I usually get from Europeans when I tell them no, not really. Long discussion about the silly things in the US, why I wouldn't want to go back to my own country, blah blah blah. I wouldn't even have considered this encounter noteworthy but then we started talking about something else. He very bluntly asked me if I was religious (it's pretty rare here, where people are so politically correct and conscious of such different religious beliefs, the fact that it's not really talked about I think is for the best). Again, he seemed surprised by my answer. He thought for a while, and then said that when I am older, I should go back to my home country for a year and help poor, old, sick people (for simplicity's sake, I told him I was a doctor). That should be my religion. I really liked that. Helping people should be a religion.
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