Welcome to New York (just kidding!)

My brother got a card from a colleague at work that had these words on the cover. I really liked it. A lot. New York is the most wonderful place in the world. It is really the center of the world. If you don’t find it here, you wont find it anywhere, that old news, right.
Salsa, Kabala, Buddhist Meditation, Christ of the Later Days, Pilates, Gay, Film Festivals of all sorts, foods for every pocket and taste, bikes, parks, you name it, really. But being Brazilian knowing that nothing is perfect and comparisons are inevitable, I am daring to suggest some cultural “improvements” and exchanges that would really add to NY.

There are some things that New Yorkers have to learn from Brazilians. There are some things that Brazilians have to learn from New Yorkers. Learning and exchanging with other cultures is obvious, in all fields. New Yorkers have to learn how to me a bit more flexible, to have a bit more of what we call in Portuguese “ jogo de cintura”, something like “waist game”( expression form Soccer), meaning one can giggle a bit more to adapt to different situations in life, not to get so stressed and sometimes, depressed when things don’t go the way they expect or they are used to. It looks like people here find it a bit hard to apply everything they study in real life.
Brazilians, on the other hand, should learn from Americans how to take studies seriously. Any pottery class here sounds more serious that my whole 4 year journalism course.
Work is valued here. Delivery people get paid more if they have to bring stuff upstairs. I n Brazil, they are hardly paid for delivering anything anywhere. People are always working for free and made feel obliged to do “favors” for bosses.
Services can be funny here (and if you can find it “funny”, it wont spoil you evening). You go to a restaurant and in many cases it will look like someone is doing you a favor and that it is not a professional relationship where you are at some commercial establishment where people are the to actually “serve” you. This would improve if Brazilians brought some of the culture here. It is always a pleasure to go to a restaurant in Brazil. People are happy to see you. Not always the case here. I went to a Restaurant near the river on the Upper West Side last summer and while I was eating my sandwich (bad) and having a warm beer, the waitress approached and asked me if I minded speeding a bit with that sandwich as there was a line of people waiting for a table.
Sometimes the restaurant is empty and they wouldn’t let you sit a t a table even if you want to have a drink. I find it hard to understand how things work, really.
Still in services, in NY, and in the whole of USA, you can exchange anything you buy, they will give you your money back requiring absolutely no further explanation. They and get a refund in Brazil. Just try. I bough a bag in a Brazilian shop here in Soho and not only they gave me the wrong price (there was a tag with a much lower price inside the bag), but they never gave me a receipt and after using the bag one day, it broke. You have no one to complain or to talk to…
Good thing here is that one can trust in most cases. People start form the principle that people are reliable, that is nice.
In New York, manicures are bad, but one is able to walk in Central Park, oh, that Jackie Onassis Reservoir is a “killer”, use the subway system to go everywhere, iced coffee, Film Forum, B&H, Whole Foods, Museums, Opera and a lot more…
Come and see it for yourself.