Soary: the advice is overwhelmingly to go to New York, isn't it? As most people haven't lived and worked there, it'd be a bit presumptuous to try and give 'advice' on what one doesn't know. As has been said, correctly, New York is not like living in any other US city - in fact, one could say that living in San Francisco is not like living in Los Angeles, which is not at all like living in Seattle, which is nothing like living in Houston, etc. Given the enormous distances between the state capitals, for example, there are big cultural/religious/ethnic differences which one can only appreciate more fully by living in a cosmopolitan US city. I've been on business to Chicago, New York and Houston, spent plenty of fun time staying with American friends in Tulsa and San Francisco, had a house built outside Tampa, Fla., which I never got to live in, and I'd always encourage, as in advise, a young person to experience somewhere new to them. I enjoyed all the bits of the US I got to see, and there's still plenty I hope to see in future when finances permit, so I would just plain recommend the experience - once in NY, there are just hundreds of other places to go and see on weekends. It's a huge country, with endless cheap internal flights, plus the doughty Greyhound buses, so it wouldn't be a question of forever being pinned to a city desk.