Urban Living vs. Countryside: Do They Turn Us Into Different People?

On waking up with the cow bells, big-city living and triple-chocolate cake portions.

I grew up in an Eastern European city that looked like a black-and-grey Lego toy set.

Every day of my childhood, the element I saw most was the cement of the communist-grey buildings surrounding us. Concrete, identical, cube-like buildings of matchbox apartments. Concrete sidewalks, concrete stairs. Concrete improvised car garages that popped up like mushrooms in the oddest places. Cement lava had been poured to fill in every nook above the earth’s surface.

I think I must have been 23 when I ran barefoot in the grass for the first time. Digging up the earth and feeling it slip through my fingers; I’m not sure I’ve ever done that besides repotting my plants well into my adulthood. Sitting with my back to the trunk of a tree and looking up at its leaves; I’ve probably done that for the first time when I started grad school on a US American campus. 

In the city, I always thought that trees stood motionless, only their leaves fluttering in the wind. But once I spent more time in the woods, I saw how flexible all trees were, how their long trunks swayed from side to side, at once with the wind.

Being close to nature, touching it, stepping on it has been unfamiliar - and mesmerizing - for my entire life. 

I grew up in what I see today as a hostile place for the soul. Photos of my native Romanian city from the ’80s, when I was a kid, remind me of a bald, chemotherapied head. Nature was burnt to the ground, annihilated as if cancerous, and replaced by wall upon wall of grey, inert cubes. Planting some daffodil bulbs in the spring was just a school project in a sterile setting, as removed as it could be from the natural world.

Image of my hometown, in Eastern Romania, in the ’80s.

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Last winter, I spent a few days in the Spanish countryside. At 8:08 in the morning, the cowbells, ringing in a steady rhythm down below, woke me up before dawn. I could see the crimson sky right from my bed, coloring the window of the mountain cottage I was in. In 15 minutes the sun would rise above the horizon and all that fiery-red show would be replaced by baby-blue sky. 

There was no other sound but the cowbells’ jangle. And maybe a faint chirping of a bird waking up. I opened the window to let out some of the heat from the fireplace, and the cold air that rolled in smelled of manure mixed with rosemary.

The monumental silence made me hold my breath in awe. 

Very far on the distant horizon, I could make out a constellation of blinking micro-lights. It was where the civilization was. A place so different from the countryside where I was that it might as well be on a different planet. It made me ponder on how differently we evolve and get shaped depending on our surroundings. How different those people must have been, far away in that big city under the blinking lights. 

The Big-City people didn’t see the sun rise from behind the mountains, nor a long-drawn sunset hour. It’s either bright or shadow in the Big City, the circular spectrum of the sun is truncated by steel, glass and concrete.

The Big-City people didn’t see the fog below their house before the first rays of sunshine. They didn’t have to go source wood for their fireplaces. 

The Big-City people woke up with an alarm clock instead of a cow's bell. They woke up in darkness, behind their shut blinds, oblivious to the existence of the sun. They heard their neighbors, street traffic or the news on TV, instead of waking up in monumental silence. They slipped out of their homes and jumped in their cars, turned on the heating to Caribbean temperatures, instead of walking in boots and fur coats on the earthen paths inhaling frosty air. 

They had traffic, construction-site drilling, honks, artificial light, constant temperatures regardless of the season. They had garbage collectors that made indecent noises night after night under their windows. They had computers they stared into all day long, they listened to truths told by influencers, had KPIs and individual scores, video calls, compulsive shopping of objects they didn't need, they followed fashion brands like the disciples followed Christ. They had no stars in the sky. 

That morning up in the mountains, as I watched the sun rise and the fog disappear under the jangle of the cows’ bells, I felt I was a million light years away from my Big-City hometown, still drowned in concrete lava to this day. 

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But the big cities had once been untouched wilderness.  

When I was still living in a two-million-people city, I had a vision while rushing to catch the bus to work one morning. Instead of seeing the cityscape as the default, with a few planted trees and patches of grass, I saw the forest that the place used to be. Wild, unmanicured vegetation with boars roaming about under the buzzing of bumblebees. A jungle that had been invaded by buildings, the earth paths straightened and covered with a carpet of asphalt.

The concrete blocks set over the earth, the gravestone of the trees’ future saplings. I saw the trees not as decorative plants, but as the original inhabitants of the place, their roots pushing through the man-made sidewalk, reclaiming their own territory, one unpaved square at a time. 

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After living for 20+ years in big cities, from Miami to Frankfurt and beyond, I came to believe that the big city is fitting only in short bursts, from time to time, while the countryside is the foundation of our human life.

The countryside is the vitamin-filled breakfast, while the big city is a slice of triple chocolate cake - advisable only every once in a while. 

Where do you feel most alive?