Submitted by Kara
Is there a city where you can have Chinese dumplings for dinner, with an African-born man, and his Russian girlfriend, before crossing the street and taking part in traditional middle eastern hookah? I am, of course, referring to New York City. Nowhere else in the world is there such a vibrant and varied mix of cultures, experiences, cuisines and people. The word for this experience is eclectic, there’s no other way to describe it succinctly. In this article we explore how diversity leads to eclectic taste, and why it’s good for the world.
Homogeneous
Having grown up in a small town, where everyone talked the same, everyone dressed the same, everyone went to the same school, took the same classes, hung around at the same bowling alleys and arcades, looked the same, and even thought the same thoughts, it’s difficult to understand that the world could be fundamentally different outside of that bubble. Watching a lot of late night TV helped to open my eyes. I always understood that I was (being Black) different from those around me (mostly Caucasian-Americans). The seed of discovery was there, and I was just waiting to experience the rest of the world, even though I didn’t know it. All I knew was a homogeneous home town, full of home boys.
Travel
You can imagine my shock, wonder and surprise when I first encountered a large city. Even though everyone still spoke the same language as me, it was like I had discovered, in the one day, that I was both from another planet, and that this city that I had just arrived in was my home planet. That city, of course, was NYC. Travelling here, I experienced my first moment of standing in fascination of street performance art, graffiti, eating real New York pizza, and the view from one skyscraper to another. If this was what travel meant, then I was going to be all about it.
Diversity
With so many different cultures and families living in New York City, it is inevitable that there will be a cross-section of people with all different kinds of tastes and preferences. If you want to learn more about a culture, you can quickly find and talk to someone who was born in that culture. If you want to try new food, you can just travel to the part of the city where the people of that culture are from.
Cultures
A city like NYC collects all kinds of interesting objects, and not just in museums. For example, I had never considered furniture to be interesting, only that it could be functional, or antique (a synonym for “old”, for me). However, encountering the house of my friend’s parents, I discovered their taste in furniture was truly eclectic. They had a lacquered Japanese room divider, from Japan, a solid mahogany table for the study, and a long, authentic and beautiful persian rug running down the hallway. I took a dictionary from the bookshelf and looked up the word “eclectic” I learned and I knew what that word meant, that day.
Homogeneous again
Since travelling to New York, and having my eyes opened, I have also traveled back to my hometown, and felt the sameness again. It was bittersweet, because I have a lot of beautiful childhood memories there. I have also traveled to Southeast Asia and have visited Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Surprisingly, it reminded me of home, in a particular way. Allow me to explain. In all of these places, I have been able to experience a wildly different culture, different foods, customs, religions and I found it to be completely foreign to my own culture. But at times, I also found it to be a more homogeneous culture. Each region, of course, has its own special qualities, but in general, within each of these countries there is more of a similar culture, language, food and even entertainment. The different regions appear similar to me, but of course, to the local citizens, they seem vastly different. You can appreciate the subtle differences when you’re most familiar with something. Similarly to how pizza in New York and in San Francisco probably seem the same to someone who has never had pizza before! The experience of travelling to these places, being in a foreign country, all speaking the same language, having similar food and similar entertainment throughout the whole country was amazing, and eye opening, but I understood that diversity in culture is not to be found “overseas” by default, it’s only in certain places. Those places are special. I have traveled from country to country, and not encountered as diverse and as eclectic a collection of people and objects, as I found in New York City. This surprised me, but helped me to open my eyes to the true meaning of diversity and what it really entails, to have so many different cultures meeting in one place.
Conclusion
I hope that it’s obvious that the world would be a better place if we had more diversity, more awareness of what other customs and lives are out there. It would be much more interesting to live in a city where we had a mix of cultures, tastes, designs, art, food, entertainment and people. It naturally makes you more open minded and more tolerant. It would be much more interesting to travel to a country where we encountered a mix of cultures, tastes, designs, art, food, entertainment and people. In short, I think we are all better off if we had more diversity. That’s why NYC is my favorite city in the whole world. If you know of a city that is as eclectic as this one, please drop me a line, I’d love to visit you!