When I went to Philadelphia for the first time in my adult life, I was throughly impressed in many ways. Cities represented all that was good in humanity, yet also all that was bad. Cities are the centers of our society, all which our society revolves around. Yet, they also mean the utter most worst poverty and horrors like crime that we must face.

Central Philadelphia was a colorful place, representing a diverse population, wealth, and color, simply not seen in Rural America. People go there for action, to leave their local communities behind. It seemed that the downtown never seemed to slow down, with friendly people all around. Everything was at a scale almost unimaginable by myself.

Yet, it also represented malice and crime. There were homeless people around begging for money in the home of brotherly love. You drove by countless miles of slum, abandoned factories, and poverty at levels that seemed so foreign for a country boy. It seemed like somehow the other side of the city had been ignored for so long, and at such a great scale compared to things in the country.

It seems that everything in big cities are super-sized. All of the evil of the small city simply were bigger, and all of the good in the small city was just a little more grandeur. Big cities aggregate both good and bad together, making for a troublesome mix of joy and sorrow, and creating emotions beyond anything I had ever experienced before in my life.