"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

I hate the question, "what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

I get it every once in a while when people find out I moved to Israel from New York. Everyone knows New York is great. I knew it too, when I left my hometown with some sadness if not mixed feelings.

New York is a hard place to leave. It is vibrant and awe-inspiring and it's magic was never lost on me even at it grittiest. I appreciated the movie-like grandeur of where I lived on W 60th Street smack dab in the middle of Woody Allen-ville near Lincoln Center in one direction, Central Park in the other - and a Whole Foods down the street. I would step onto the street in front of my building every morning to greet the pedestrian madness of students, doctors, businesspeople, tourists and residents always passing by. Columbus Circle was the point of so many destinations, and the centralized hub of so many subways lines branching out all over the city. You were never alone.

And I appreciated the grit too right down to the packed subway and the shiny concrete streets on grey rainy dreary days. Sometimes New York was overwhelming, but mostly I enjoyed the instant easy access to everything I could ever possibly need. Central Park was my respite for dog walks or long runs, and work was always an easy 20 minute commute no matter how many times I changed jobs. My neighborhood also happened to be my old high school stomping ground and every once in a while I would smile to think of the teenaged me hanging out at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art just down the street. And here I was now, all "growed up."

I loved New York to the bitter end, and chose to leave anyway. "Leave on a high note," they always say. I simply realized it was time for a change after several years secretly suspecting it was true. The moment of truth hit me in Nicaragua of all places on my way to a yoga class amidst mango and coconut trees. I was traveling again in between jobs and knew right then that I could not just go back to life as I left it. New York was great but there was no picking up where I left off to my office job interspersed with friends, parties, runs, dinners, weekend day trips, trips... and nothing else. My New York life lacked for nothing but I still felt something was missing. Perhaps a change of scenery would help me figure out what.

I thought family might have something to do with it so I came to Israel, where my sister and nephew live. My parents are in New York and I am close to them both. But we are only two sisters, who had never really gotten to know each other as adults and were now getting ready for families of our own. Getting to raise our children with the cousins and aunts we ourselves didn't have growing up so far away from extended family would be a gift.

And I was approaching 40. New York's celebrated diversity includes its fair share of single men and women who live the high life well into whatever age they see fit. I had been in and out of relationships but had counted myself among them for some time. Every once in a while, visions of my life 5 or 10 years later flashed before my eyes. Nothing had changed. I was still living my comfortable  Upper West Side existence, balancing work and pleasure as best I could, indulging every once in a while and saving as much of my expendable income for "the future" as possible.

That was the easy part. The rest had become one big murky blank I could not quite conjure into focus.

"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" my American colleague wanted to know. It was an honest and sincere question. He really wanted to know, he who wears a kippa and considers himself "trapped" here by children and grandchildren who make it too difficult to leave.

Israel is not an easy place. Unless you are religious and filled with Zionist zeal - which he knew I wasn't - it can be hard to understand what compelled me to replace the ease and flow of New York with something more challenging and difficult on so many levels. A place practically claustrophobic with beauracracy, politics and geography where the money to just make ends meet doesn't come anywhere near as easy for so many. The question is in fact so understandable it is always hard for me to explain, so instead I laugh along and agree I must be crazy.

Sometimes I think I am. The rest of the time I look at my life with its new set of uncertainties and am filled with gratitude. I didn't leave New York for guarantees that things would be better. But I know a nice girl like me deserves to live her best possible life - even if means leaving the comfort of everything she knows with only some vague hope she might find it.

My sister and me enjoying a laugh.