Central Park - 10 things we saw and one we missed...

Going to Central Park is not simply like walking through a city park.
It's actually more like stepping into some kind of parallel world: one moment you are in middle of Manhattan's skyscrapers and traffic, and the moment after you are surrounded by this green little big universe with its own soul and personality.
It is indeed the green lung of NYC, because it's so big that it could surely work fine even for such a huge metropolis like the Big Apple - and it surely provides also a metaphorical chance to breathe, to take a break from the syncopate rhytms that rule outside of it.
It's like an oasis. And I know this is something that could be said for almost every city park in the world, but here this contrast is even more sharp and evident.

Black Cat & the City

Have you ever fallen in love with someone completely different from you? With someone so different that, before getting to know him for real, you'd always thought you would have hated him?
I have, and it's happened at first sight.
I'm talking about New York City, also known as THE City - which I've always thought it was somehow snooty and stilted, but now I do get it.
New York is "the" City for antonomasia because it has the quintessential charisma of urbanity. Sure, it is big and it is loud but it does it with a style: that's not chaos, that's dynamicity and it actually melts in harmony as a feature of a city that is the center of the world, that neverendingly creates and is on the moving.
I've never thought I could have been a NYC girl: I'm all for cosy atmospheres, Old Europe, silence and quiet, places that makes you feel like you are stepping back in time, and I thought that the Big Apple, so modern, so rampant couldn't really be my cup of tea.
Still I thought it was a "must" to visit it for once in a lifetime, so I was curious to see it.
And I'd say it's been the biggest positive surprise in my life as a traveller so far.
That's why, basically, I sometimes end up choosing to visit places that don't really appeal me at first: I like giving myself the chance to get surprised, and I like getting confronted with something quite different from my usual destinations, because it might help to reveal some new parts of myself.

2013: a year of travel achievements

2013 is over since a few days.
It's been one difficult but important year, made of lessons and achievements, of some gloomy moments but also of creativity and some great fun.
And anyway it's made me decide to open this blog :)
So - because of this reason, and because most of the positive parts it's given me have been achieved during/because of trips, I've thought it would have been decide to commemorate such achievement with a post :)

In this year I've managed to...