I Love New York: Bagels, Rats & Rent

Fresh from Moscow's suspicion, Monaco's glamour, and Cyprus' cats, Sebastian von Bulow lands in New York City - a place where dreams are currency, rent is violence, and nobody has time for your feelings unless your feelings are paying for brunch.

This is not the romantic New York from movies.
This is the real one: loud, brilliant, impatient, impossible, addictive.
A city that will teach you who you are by stripping everything else away.

If Moscow froze him and Monaco judged him, New York devours him - lovingly.

- The Airport Arrival Ritual
JFK baggage purgatory, where suitcases disappear into wormholes and jetlag is a civic requirement.

- Apartment Hunting in the Apocalypse
Shoeboxes priced like summer homes. Showings that feel like competitive sports. Landlords who look at you like you're applying for parole.

- Neighborhood Theology
From SoHo illusions to Harlem honesty, from Upper East Side rituals to Brooklyn's curated chaos - every block has commandments, and every borough believes it's right.

- The Gospel of Bagels and Coffee
Finding breakfast that doesn't bankrupt you.
Learning that the city's true religion is caffeine.

- Public Transport as Character-Building
Subways that groan with history and humidity.
Strangers who become therapists, prophets, or threats in one stop.

- Working, Hustling, Surviving
Careers forged at 2 a.m., dreams rewritten before lunch, ambition measured in exhaustion levels rather than achievements.

- Weather That Attacks
Winters that bruise, summers that melt, storms that arrive like personal vendettas.

- Nights That Heal and Hurt
Bars, rooftops, hidden basements, found families, lost weekends - the city's nightlife is both therapy and danger.

Sebastian soon learns the city's rules:

- Thou shalt walk faster than your anxiety.
- Thou shalt not take Times Square personally.
- Thou shalt carry cash for the bodega and anger for everything else.
- Thou shalt understand that brunch is political.
- Thou shalt reinvent thyself at least twice before summer.
- Thou shalt treat rent like an abusive relationship.
- Thou shalt never admit defeat - only relocation.

New York isn't a place you live in. It's a place you negotiate with.

For every nightmare - the noise, the bills, the crowds, the bureaucracy - New York offers something rare:

moments of accidental humanity.

The stranger who holds the subway door.
The bartender who listens.
The skyline at 3 a.m. when the city softens.
The sense that anything can happen, even to you, even now.

Sebastian discovers the hardest truth of all:

You don't fall in love with New York immediately.
You fall in love with who you become there.

I Love New York is the fourth volume in Sebastian von Bulow's Commandments Series, the global memoir saga of culture shock, survival instinct, deadpan humor, and accidental self-reinvention across nine cities.

This volume is sharp, emotional, cinematic, and painfully relatable - a love letter to the most exhausting, exhilarating city on Earth.

A city where:

- hope is currency
- ambition is oxygen
- failure is tuition
- and love - for the place, for the people, for the version of yourself who refuses to quit - is the final commandment.

Because in New York, you don't just survive.
You become.