Grilled Cheese and the Big Apple: An International Student's First Visit to New York City

Before visiting New York for the first time, my memory was filled with a deluge of images from “Friends” and “How I Met Your Mother,” both sitcoms that are set in New York. I had the impression that when one is in New York, there are no ordinary moments — at any one point in time, something, big or small, is happening. As a romantic, in every face I saw, I envisioned a lively person. New York, I believed, was the capital of modernism. I went to New York for the first time last week for a debat