Two Cities: Two Different Views

                                                    

              New York City and Libreville (the largest city in Gabon) are two cities I happened to live in during the last decade.  These two cities have many differences than similarities. Both cities lie in the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and both of them have beautiful beaches (Coney Island in New York City and the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Libreville), but they are completely different in every other aspect. Their most noticeable differences are in their appearances and their sizes.

         New York City has some of the tallest and most famous buildings in the world. For example, the Empire State building, the Freedom Towers, the Chrysler Building are all symbols of the city architecture. These tall buildings with many more buildings alongside them dominate the view of the city, particularly in Manhattan. On the other hand, in Libreville, the tall buildings are very sizable and may hardly be over five floors heights. They look like some of the buildings in the Bronx, in Queens, and so on. They are mostly built with woods. Many of these buildings in Libreville may house only one family while in New York City one building alone can house thousands and thousands people.

       The volume of population living in a particular city or zone has a great influence on the structure and the size of that city or zone. New York City is believed to have more than eight millions people who are very diverse and culturally tolerant. New York City may be even five times more populated than the entire Gabonese population. According to the United Nations Statistics Division in 2011 “Libreville, the largest city in Gabon has only 686000 residents” (World Statistic Pocketbook/United Nations Statistics Division).  This is about 1/12 of the population living in New York City.

        When I first came to city seven years ago I was in a shock. For the first time I walked in Manhattan looking at the tall buildings in every block. I wondered if those buildings were really men-maid. Of course I could not say it louder because I did not want my friends to make fun of me, but I truly had those feelings on my minds. Coming directly from Libreville to New York City helped me realize more the differences in structure and size of these two cities besides what I knew before from movies.

                                                                                   Work cited

United Nations Statistic Division.” World Statistics Pocketbook”, data. un.org/CountryProfile. N. D.

Data.un .org/CountryProfile web, March 7, 2014.