I live (what usually ends up being) a 9 hour drive away from New York City. Before September, I had no experience spending time in the City, and still haven’t really been in most of the boroughs, so Salvo’s lecture was particularly interesting to me.  The statistics that most surprised me were the size of New York and its boroughs, and the migrations numbers.  First of all, New York is larger than the next 3 biggest cities combined, and well over twice as large as LA, the second most populace US city. Also, holding the preconceived notions of an outsider, I had always assumed Manhattan was the largest borough, but both Brooklyn and Queens out-populate it. But the fact that Manhattan alone is bigger than a city as large as Philadelphia is incredible to me. The second fact I mentioned, total migration, also shattered some of my views as an outsider. Primarily, the concept that so many people leave the city to live elsewhere in the nation (many more than migrate to it) is incredible to me because, while I have only been here a few months, I can’t imagine wanting to leave unless it was to a foreign country.  A final thing that I think will make this course particularly interesting to me, is that Buffalo is not very diverse or dynamic. This is not the case with New York.