During my first trips to Europe I was mostly impressed by people. In particular, by the gap I saw between us and them. They always seemed to be more educated, ready to help and polite. But now that I have been to the US, Europeans seem to be street thugs from suburbs in comparison with the Americans.

I flew to America full of prejudices and ideas seeded into my head by different people, starting with Zadornov and finishing some acquaintances. This is why I treated everything with excess suspicion and skepticism, which is one of the traits of my character. In every New York shop wherever we went people greeted us with a smile and wished a good day when we were leaving. Now it’s clear that any employer in retail understands that client's loyalty depends on staff's attitude to him. So I started to attribute this politeness to professional preparation. But quite often the talk was not finished by mere 'How are you' and 'Have a nice day'. We had a lot of conversations and I could see the person is just interested. It was something like a chat in a bar: 'Tell where you come from, how do you like New York, we recommend you to go there and there, I come from there, I have an acquaintance from Ukraine, what do you think about Trump?' Sometimes a conversation went on although I showed that explicitly I was not going to buy anything.

A suspicion crawled into my mind in a couple of days. And what if they really want to know how I am doing? Strangers made me compliments about my sneakers in the streets several times. When Lena put her best skirt around five people, completely different pedestrians, came up to her just to make a compliment. Once when we stopped at a crossing in Chinatown to check the map if we turned into right direction. We were there not even for a minute, when a man came and asked if we needed any help. I was just shocked. And taxi-drivers… They like to talk anywhere in the world. But ours will tell you about politics, about who's right and wrong and how you need to govern the country, and American would rather listen to you. Who are you, where did you come from and so on. Here's the most remarkable case.

A huge Ford pickup came for us. Inside it was equally huge, you can just live in it. After we spoke about ourselves, he told us about how he moved from Alaska to Vegas with his Japanese wife who was too tired of cold. Then he said something I'll remember for a long time. He made a compliment about my English. And then he learnt why we had come to Vegas. He was really excited. He put my number into his phone and said he would follow our progress in Maine. He promised that if I get to TV-table, he would give up all his things to do and come to support me with his wife. And when we were to leave, he asked for a photo! People impressed me most during my first trip to America.