We were lucky last month – we got to go to New York. We hadn’t been in 6 years.
What had changed?
Well what was most noticeable was that New York had got more expensive. Now sterling exchange rate against the dollar doesn’t help but overall prices were up – it shocked us but didn’t spoil our fun.
What countered this was how nice the New Yorkers were – true!
We were trying to put money on our Metro Card on Times Square and the machines wouldn’t work.
A New Yorker male, late 30s called us over and took us through the stiles with his card. That cost him $5.50 – almost enough for a beer!
He refused to take any money and wished us “a nice day” in the warmest way.
As we wandered around we remembered the story of the origin of the term “Big Apple.”
Musicians from the South gave the city this nickname because they were always nervous to play here – a big challenge – so it made their Adam’s apple feel larger.
Which again reminded us of the story of a visitor asking a New York policeman: “How he could get to Carnegie Hall”?
The policeman replied: “Keep on practicing.”
Talking about policeman, they were everywhere. We had not seen so many in one city for a long time.
As one officer said “There are 40,000 policemen in New York since 9/11. We are here to keep the city safe.”
It felt it.
We keep our stories in a storybook so that when we need to make a connection and help people understand better, we have a collection of personal stories to draw on. We highly recommend you do the same.
If you’d like to know more about our storytelling workshops then go to our Workshop pages on the site.
Posted by Sally Clare on Tuesday, December 10th, 2019 in Features › News ›
Tags: storytelling