I’m in New York! Awesome, but California is better

My daughter is playing a tennis tournament in New Jersey and we decided to use the opportunity to spend a couple of days in New York, to show the great city to our ten-year-old twins.

Before I immigrated to America, America and New York were synonymous.

First, synonymous in a very cliched way. I grew up in Soviet Moscow. America was a mystery. And America was New York, to be more specifically — its skyscrapers.

Then, when I was fourteen, I went to America as a foreign exchange student. I spent…