LETTER: The Big Apple bites back

There is no place to park your car in the Harvard Yard. Perhaps if someone had given us out-of-staters fair warning of this anomaly, the indigenous students of Boston wouldn’t be as insulted by our presence here. (‘Better people, better bagels,’ Oct. 2) Or maybe they were the ones who started the rumor in the first place. Alas, it is my own New York fault that I chose to venture from the comforts of mommy and daddy to pursue my college education in the big bad world of unfamiliarity. The tension between Boston and New York is news to no one, but the intolerance exhibited by some native BU students might be.
Fortunately for us impostors, this beloved private university is, at least according to CollegeBoard.com, predominantly attended by out-of-state students. So aren’t you locals sort of the ones imposing on us? If our overwhelming presence makes you feel uncomfortable, incompetent or repressed, it doesn’t take an academic advising appointment to realize that your collegiate Garden of Eden is a real place.
By all means, if you insist on paying 10s of thousands of dollars to go to college with the same people you sat next to while learning how to read, I urge, nay, I insist that you demand the administration cough up our ‘foreign currency’ ‘-‘- surely people from New York are from a different planet, and obviously a different monetary system ‘-‘- and send us packing at once.
Yet in spite of this bizarre prejudice, the feeling is not mutual. Boston, you are beautiful. Your streets are green, your taxis are clean and your rowing competition conveniently beckons for me potential husbands every October. I do not dare take you for granted. I only wish that your native people were not so archaic in their unwillingness to embrace new arrivals.
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Allison Giuffre
COM ’11