LAFAYETTE AND HOUSTON

Life in New York sounds very exciting to a temporary visitor. It stimulates those who love the arts, those who love Fashion, those whose taste in fine cuisine is demanding, it rejuvenates every single traveler who visits the city. The challenge is how the city is stimulating for those who work and live here permanently. Those whose work schedule managing one or two even jobs working morning and night and even also during the weekend doesn’t allow them to enjoy as often as they would have liked to a new movie screening, a Broadway Show a new gig that their friend has in Brooklyn, a visit to the Met or the Guggenheim or simply some free time reading a book by the park seating on a bench for hours. Easily someone would think that for them, life in New York is a routine. That for them New York is not stimulating. To the contrary though because it is this endless flow of new ideas and new faces of the people who visit New York for a week, for a month for six months or for ever that keeps those who live here stimulated. It is that mixture of unaccomplished imaginary illusions from all around the world that meet in the streets of Manhattan every day creating a song rhythm that never stops playing in the head of the locals. That is what takes us all far away from a routine. It’s the underground energy. What we Greeks call DIPSA.

To Maria life in New York never stopped being a source of inspiration and motivation for new things and new stories. Sometimes she is so busy multitasking between her job at Conde Nast International and her second job at the restaurant that she realizes the change of the seasons by the new Calvin Klein poster in the corner of Lafayette and Houston where she passes by after her yoga class.

The Calvin Klein seasonal ad campaign and poster is part of the New York scene, the New York vibe that she so much loved. Did she really expect when she arrived five and a half years ago that living in Manhattan would be Easy? What a childish thought that would be. But yet it was a necessary one to keep the journey alive, to keep her dreams and goal expectations up high like the Calvin Klein poster that no matter rain or shine is high up there in the corner of our hearts-

- Maria Garozi