Establishing oneself and one's families in a new country or a new city can be difficult. It takes time, patience and effort to understand any new city. It takes knowledge, skill and a sense of humor to live in the City. But once you understands her and know where the pleasant places are, how to get there and what to do about getting what you want, life in the City can be truly exciting. Whatever your dream, you can realize it in the City. There's nothing the City doesn't offer - if you want it badly enough. New York City is a real city! People work, live and play in the same physical space, bringing the City alive at all hours of the day and night. There are no cloistered neighborhoods or gated communities. Supermodels strut the streets like common folk, and big stars take their kids to the neighborhood playgrounds just like everyone. It is really a good time to live in NYC. Tourism is at high and crime rates are the lowest they've been more than three decades. Geographically, Manhattan is a tiny island, only 22.7 miles square, when up is north, down is south, left is west and right is east. It is one of the easiest places in the world to navigate and understand. Central Park lies almost in the center of this island. Fifth Avenue divides the island between the East Side and West Side. Generally, Manhattan is divided to Uptown,Midtown (the area between 34th and 59th Streets) and Downtown. Most of Manhattan (except downtown area) is organized very simple: avenues run north-south, and streets run east-west. Street numbers climb as you go north. Below Houston Street - the streets have names and not numbers. With 714 miles of truck, 469 stations and 6,089 subway cars, NYC's subway system is the world's largest. The subway run twenty-four hours a day and carry 1.2 billion passengers a year, while the City's public bus system consists of 300 routes and carries 600 million people a year on 4,200 buses. Immigrants continue to pour in and the City boasts more than 100 ethnic newspapers. The public schools are macrocosmos of the world's population, with multiracial and multilingual student bodies. The languages spoken in the hallways range from Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian and many more. A major boost to the City's image, economy and celebrity status, the film industry plays a major role in the New York economy. There are sixty to ninety films productions daily, with a total of 22,851 aggregated shooting days. Just walk around the City any day of the week and you're bound into a film crew, walk onto a set, or spy a star. Culturally, you can't do better than 150 museums, thirty-eight Broadway playhouses, scores of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions, more galleries even than museums, hundreds of dance clubs, music clubs, and poetry readings - and that's just the begining... A part of the actual decision to relocate is where you'll live. NYC is geographically small, but your day-to-day life will center around two even smaller areas: where you live and where you work. Many aspects of your life will flow from your choice of neighborhood, and even from your choice of block and building. In the real NYC, even multimillionaires have to make some compromises - and the rest of us have to compromise a whole lot. The delicate balance between the need for a space in which you'll be happy and the need for a few dollars left over to cover other essentials (like food) is an elusive target for every New Yorker. The neighborhood in which you live affect what you do and who you see in the City. Most of the newcomers tend to pay attention more to where they live than how to live there. Not for nothing are New Yorkers neighborhood proud. It is more than just an address. Neighborhoods provide residents with identification and a sense of belongings, which in turn gives the individual the heart of daily confrontations with the city's size and pace. Most neighborhoods in Manhattan are likely to have supermarkets, dry cleaners, health clubs, hair salons, nail salons etc. Just about every service imaginable is going to be within a few blocks of your front door if you live in Manhattan - and the rest, well, you can get it delivered... When considering a neighborhood, you'll want to weigh the following primary factors: Your personality and the personality of the neighborhood Cost of housing Availability of desirable housing Safety Proximity to work Manhattan's rental market often requires compromises, not only in the way you live but also in the neighborhood you choose. But wherever you land, once established, you'll probably become a booster of you own special area.