Right outside New York

I come from Europe, that for the record is somewhere in the outskirts of New York city. For most people here world geography is extremelly simple. Either you live in any of the quarters of New York (and they know with astonishing accuracy their names and locations), i.e. Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, etc. or you live farther or nearer away from it. In short, the world is basically New York and its outskirts. It is funny how information filters all the way from New York to this little Andean village. And how it is distorted in the meanwhile. By the way, I love the way they call New York. 'La yony'. I have no idea who was the first person to call it like that. It comes from the sticker 'I♥NY'. And it is widely used in Andean Ecuador, especially in the provinces of Cañar and Azuay. These two provinces, with a shared cañari past (group who inhabited this area when the Incas from Peru arrived), have been sending migrants to 'la yony' for over three decades. And the flow is far from over.