New York

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           Right away we had a little problem. We thought we would stroll slowly along, looking around attentively - studying everything, so to speak; observing, taking it all in and so on. But New York isn't a city where people move slowly. People weren't walking past us, they were running. So we also started to run. And we haven't been able to stop since. We lived a whole month in New York and the entire time we were rushing somewhere as fast as we could go.

           It's hard to get lost in New York, although many streets are amazingly similar. The secret is simple. There are two kinds of streets: avenues run lengthwise, and streets run crosswise. That's how the island of Manhattan is planned out. First, Second, and Third Avenue all run parallel to each other. Further on, still parallel, run Lexington Avenue, Fourth Avenue, which past Central Station is called Park Avenue (that's the street where rich people live), Madison Avenue, the beautiful shopping area Fifth Avenue, Sixth, Seventh, and so on. Fifth Avenue divides the city into two parts, the West Side and the East Side. All these avenues (there aren't many of them) are crossed by streets, of which there are several hundred. While the avenues have some kind of identifying characteristics (some are wider, some are narrower, the El runs over Third and Seventh, there's a lawn laid out down the middle of Park Avenue, the Empire State Building and Radio City loom over Fifth Avenue), the streets are all exactly alike and even an old New Yorker can hardly tell them apart by the way they look.

Chapter Two: The First Evening in New York.