New York

My trip to the airport required a train down the Hudson, several blocks on foot through New York, and a bus trip out of the city to the airport. Each segment gave me a chance to recognize where I was leaving.

The train was full of all types of people as usual, including a buzzing asian family of four, a couple of older black women talking the whole way to work in Yonkers, and a white schoolmarm in her 60s who cross-stitched herself into a gaping-mouthed slumber.

Making my way to the bus stop from Grand Central, I was given directions from one bus driver who was chatting up another. The flamboyantly gay black man in his 50s told me my bus was "around the corner at the end of the block, daaarling."

My bus driver, a Cuban-looking man with a mustache and a smile that only went away when he'd bite his lip concentrating on the darting traffic, made sure I knew that Lufthansa flies out of "Tal-mee-nul Bee!"

My last several days upstate also brought reminders of the area's dynamically migrant culture. There was the group of Dominicans who came to buy my car. They're in the business of exporting used cars to Santo Domingo for resale, so while Mr. Torres and I were negotiating our final deal, the four others scoped out the condition and appearance of the body.

Then there's the new family that moved into the apartment below mine the week before I left. I met them one afternoon when I pulled up with a few groceries and their father, Geraldo, rushed towards me from heating up the grill.  He rather expectantly asked me to join them in the yard for food in a half hour. The four types of meat were served with lots of lime and chili sauce. Geraldo's wife, Eva, spoke no English but quickly warmed up to me asking lots of questions about the neighborhood through their three grown daughters and two young grandkids.  They'd been living elsewhere in Kingston for 8 years after moving from Mexico City.

All this diversity reminds me of the attractive energy New York has, seemingly weighed (by my current experience) to the Americas (Hispanics, West Indians), and makes me wonder in turn what I'll find in Eastern Europe. How will the enormous amount of human migration occurring right now in the world be represented in Budapest, not long ago tightly controlled under Communism, and now an emerging economy looking for new opportunity in its very recent induction into the European Union?