Last updated: October 2026
I had four hundred dollars to start a life in another country. I decided to spend half of it on two days in New York. This is the story of that decision, and of everything I learned with a broken suitcase.
The first thing that happened to me in the United States was that Avianca returned my suitcase destroyed: no wheels, split open, a wreck. And here is the most useful tip on this page, because nobody tells you: you file the claim before you leave the baggage hall. Once you walk through that door, the airline can say it broke outside. I went to the claims desk, filled in the form and they opened a case in my name. An email came later. I still had to carry the suitcase in my arms across the whole of New York.
The flight parked far from the terminal and they took us across the apron in a bus. It was a cold I did not know: I had come from the South American summer and it was 6 December in New York, with wind. And there, through the bus window, I saw an Emirates Airbus A380 for the first time in my life, with a Qatar one beside it. For most people that is a plane. For me it was something else.
At nineteen, working at the resort in Posadas, I found out that Emirates travels the world with a recruitment team looking for cabin crew, at events they call Open Days. That year there were three in Argentina: Mendoza, Buenos Aires and — do not ask me why — Posadas. I went. Everyone else wore a suit; I turned up in jeans and a shirt. They asked my age. Nineteen. It was for over-21s only, because in the United Arab Emirates the age of majority is twenty-one and by their law they cannot hire minors. That was the end of the conversation. Emirates is still the largest A380 operator in the world, with 116 of them, and flying on one is still a dream of mine. That day on the JFK apron was the first time I saw one up close.
I paid nothing for accommodation in New York. A stranger took me in through Couchsurfing, a platform where people around the world offer travellers a couch or a bed at no charge, in exchange for cultural exchange: you tell them about your country and they show you theirs. My host was an American with Mexican parents, so he spoke some Spanish, and he lived in Hell's Kitchen, right in Manhattan. He waited for me two or three blocks from his place because I had no way to tell him I had arrived.
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With no phone signal, I used the airport wifi to work out how to reach Manhattan. Train from JFK, then the subway. And there I learned something no guidebook says: New York's public transport is not designed for anyone with a suitcase. A great many stations have no escalators. That night, on top of that, one stretch of the line was closed for works: down the stairs, onto a bus to the next station, up the stairs, back onto the train, down, up, change to the subway, and up to the street again. All of it with a wheel-less suitcase in my arms. I arrived late, wrecked, and happy.
With two hundred dollars for two days, I paid for exactly two things: the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and the trip up One World Trade Center. Everything else was free: I walked Central Park, saw the Guggenheim from outside — the original, Frank Lloyd Wright's, is this one; Bilbao came forty years later — went to see the Rockefeller Center tree and the light show in front of Saks, walked the Fifth Avenue window displays, went into Trump Tower, took photos in Grand Central. And I stayed outside the American Museum of Natural History so as not to pay admission. Later I found out they have a pay-what-you-wish scheme, but it is only for residents of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut with ID: as a tourist I would have paid anyway. Just as well I did not go in.
Grand Central deserves its own line. I photographed a sign that said "tracks 100 to 117" and went away thinking there were 117 tracks. There are not: it has 67 tracks and 44 platforms on two underground levels, which makes it the largest railway station in the world by number of platforms, according to Guinness. Someone passing by took that photo, like every photo from that trip. The one at the Statue of Liberty was taken by a lady and came out crooked. I still have it.
My host worked at a technology museum in Hudson Yards, opposite The Vessel, the staircase sculpture that had opened that same year. It was closed. He took me to see the area anyway.
Going up One World Trade Center hit me for a reason that has nothing to do with the view. In third year of my degree, in the hotel module, the final project is to design a hotel from scratch: where, why, with what investment, with what services. I have always loved architecture, and my group decided our hotel would carry LEED certification, the international seal for sustainable buildings. It was a student project in Posadas. And now I was standing on top of the tallest LEED-certified building in the Western Hemisphere. I photographed the plaque: LEED Platinum, 2015. Later I learned the detail, the kind I enjoy: that plaque belongs to the observatory, the top three floors, certified Platinum for commercial interiors when it opened in May 2015. The building as a whole holds its own, Gold, since September 2016. Two separate certifications in the same place. I do not know how to explain what that feels like when you come from where I come from.
On 7 December I posted a photo in Times Square and wrote that the day before had been the most important of my life. It was not a figure of speech. I come from a humble family. Not extreme poverty, but poor: no money, no assets, no car. We own our house because my stepfather broke his back for it. I went to a state primary school, a state secondary school, and a public university, because a private one never even crossed my mind as an option. And I reached Times Square on my uncle's borrowed credit card with a suitcase that had no wheels.
The day before yesterday I had been in Argentina. In two days I had passed through Brazil, Peru, El Salvador and the United States. And my trip was only just beginning.
The ticket from New York to Salt Lake City, on JetBlue with a checked bag included, came to about two hundred dollars. I paid for it with my uncle Sergio's card, again. And I want it understood why that matters: without that card, that flight would have eaten the two hundred dollars set aside for food in my first two weeks in Park City. I would have arrived to work in the snow without a dollar. The card was not a luxury: it was the difference between arriving and not arriving. I paid him back in one go in the first days of January, out of my first paycheck.
Keep reading: my first winter in Park City →
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