I went to New York over spring break and it was okay. In fact, it was pretty cool. I know what you’re thinking, “Oh sure, be daring. No one ever said New York was cool before!”

But I really didn’t expect to think it was cool, you see. Like most things, it wasn’t exactly what I expected. It pays to travel with an open mind. Like the first time I went to Minneapolis, I thought it was so foreign. But after a couple of days, I adjusted to the strange sights and sounds.

I expected to go to New York to find it a smelly urban hellhole populated with rude, desensitized urbanites trying to screw me for everything from cab fare to free newspapers. Well, it kind of was.

But the stereotype of the rude New Yorker has been overstated in my limited experience. I think they are just busy and like to be as efficient as is humanly possible.

When you have a line of people hanging out the door of your hole-in-the-wall bagel shop looking for breakfast, the last thing you need is some cornfed dope trying to make small talk and be polite. “Oh, gee, what’s good? I see you have bagels, do you have cream cheese because I don’t see it on the menu?”

By the time you get around to making up your finicky mind about whether to have a plain bagel with butter or with jelly, they could have served ten other people who aren’t confused by the wide variety of condiment options listed on the board marked “menu.”

It isn’t personal. They just don’t have time for polite banter. When you think about it, polite banter in these cases is the rude option.

It’s like when you’re trying to cross Lincoln Way when it’s busy and some well-wisher with the right of way stops to be gallant. By the time you figure out that he is trying to be polite and let you cross, the light is about ready to change and you have to hoof it quick.

He gets mad because you didn’t jump on his offer fast enough to make it work and you are thinking that if he had just gone like he was supposed to, you could have gotten across the street faster anyway without the fear of getting run over.

If every body does what they are supposed to do, things work just fine. No, we don’t get to have the satisfaction of feeling like we did somebody a good turn, but what’s really important here? A misbegotten sense of righteousness or getting wherever the hell you are going with as little fuss and danger as possible.

I like Iowa. I like my wide-open spaces and quiet moments. I like the fact that most towns and cities I have lived in are dead by 2:30 a.m. It is hard to imagine where all of those people are going in New York at 4 a.m. Things slow down there occasionally but they don’t stop.

Tell you a couple of things I liked there were the food and the theater. I can’t eat pizza and pasta in this town again for quite some time after the linguini and clam sauce at Carmine’s off Broadway.

Dumping Hunt’s on a pack of Martha Gooch with margarine is just not the same. And the pizza, my god, the pizza. Endless varieties, hot from the oven. EVERY pizza in this town tastes like greasy, swamp ass after that. What is wrong with us that we can’t get pizza right? I don’t know.

I saw Sam Shepard’s “True West” at the Circle in the Square theater for $67.50 and it was worth it. I was so close to John C. Reilly of “Boogie Nights” fame I could smell his Schlitz. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t John a guy’s name? But Schlitz is a kind of beer. What a great night. Coming out of the theater at 10 p.m., smoking a Camel on Broadway with the throngs, dodging cabs and rain.

But I tell you, we have some good theater in this town, too. It doesn’t really matter that it is “just students” either, because theater is about so much more than the one great show that blew you away.

I have seen maybe three or four shows in my life that kicked so much ass it could almost be described as a life-changing experience and, by far, the best was a student production called “How I Learned to Drive.”

Theater isn’t like the movies. You go to the movies looking for the biggest bang for your buck and with that technology they got nowadays, you should probably get it.

But the theater is a truly human experience. You sit in a room with other human beings watching a relatively small number of fellow human beings work their asses off for your entertainment and edification.

Sure, sometimes they suck. Sometimes the play isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the director is a freak on crack who made decisions about how the play should look that were not so much daring as they were retarded. Who needs to see how “Richard III” would work if it took place on a space station? Not me, Jack!

But in the end, the theater is about life. Bringing words to life. Giving meaning and feeling to those words and connecting with the people in the audience.

Man, you go to the theater 10 times looking for that one chance in 10 that you will see something that you will remember for a lifetime.

So maybe you haven’t made it to New York yet, and you’re going to have to wait to have a really good pizza, that’s okay, try making your own.

But one thing you don’t have to go to New York for is theater. You can get that right here.

So without trying to sound like too much of a whore, go see “Shakespeare’s Women” at Fisher this weekend. I guarantee it’s a hell of a lot closer to the theater experience in New York as anything in Ames can be.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.