by Peggy Tee

Created on: October 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 04, 2010

New York City is the stuff of dreams, a mixture of bright lights and big dreams, swirled into a surreal city of soaring skyscrapers, rumbling subways and a melting pot of different people and nationalities. It is my first time here, and I touch down on new snow and catch a glimpse of Manhattan's skyline from the train into the city. Nothing really prepares you for the beauty of this - even though I've seen this so many times before on celluloid, in photographs - the visual impact hits like a punch to the solar plexus. The first thing I do at the apartment is dump my bags and off we go, into the dusky twilight of New York City on Christmas Eve.

There are roasted chestnut sellers, hotdog vendors, touts selling tickets, makeshift stalls hawking bags and watches and jewellery, tourists crowding the streets and lights, movement, noise everywhere. The city ensnares me in her claws, tosses me in a maelstrom of bright sounds and flashing sirens and the smell and breath of other people jostling shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks.

There is steam venting from the apertures in the roads and monstrous buildings hulking next to faux Renaissance faades. I slip amongst the crowd, watch the grey, blue, white clouded skies, count blocks, swipe in and out of the steel grey subways, hail yellow taxicabs, read passer-bys from shop windows, drown in accents, cross streets wearing a red beret and black boots.

How can I bring a city to life with just words? How to encapsulate the brilliance that is New York; how to even begin? I soak her in; her smog, the dirt of her underground, the harsh light of her nights, the brash, loud noise of her constantly everywhere. I am in love with this city, and stumbling shy like any lover might, I am tongue tied and overwhelmed by the hard and glinting beauty of her.

I lose my heart to NYC, walking in her streets, the first night, within the first hour that I am here. I want to tear into the soul of her, eat into the core of this city, bury my self into this great glittering beast. I want to walk her streets and wear her smoke and shadows like a second skin.

Shall I reduce my adventures down alleyways and along sharp turns and on boats and in cabs to pithy one-liners, sentences that will never wholly do this city the justice she rightly deserves? I visit all the tourist sights - the Rockefeller Centre, with its huge tree and angels out front; the Empire State, wreathed in season colours; down the bright lights and bustle of the shrines of consumerism

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