I always knew there was life beyond Great Neck. Living at home for a year after college, my commuter's existence revolved around the 7:47 and 6:24 trains into and out of the city. I built a utopian vision of urban life based on all the things I imagined I was missing while waiting for the Long Island Rail Road. Happy Hour. Morning yoga class. Spontaneous dates after work. In the days before I finally moved into my first Manhattan apartment, I dreamed of Manolo Blahniks and Mr. Big. Visions of Dirty Martinis danced in my head. I really should have known better.

Sex and the City hadn't prepared me for 12-hour workdays, gridlock, or the way the subway makes everybody sweat whether it's swelteringly hot or bitingly cold above ground. Carrie Bradshaw didn't tell me that wearing stilettos at the office all day is a fashionable form of torture. She never warned me that cleaning a kitchen is only slightly more glamorous than plunging a toilet. And she certainly hadn't notified me that, as a 20-something trying to leap into a career, I would always be tired, on the verge of the flu, and badly in need of a haircut.

I'd like to think that my experience with these first years of post-suburban, city life is fairly representative. But, for further sampling, just take the cross-town bus east along 34th Street when you arrive at Penn Station.

Murray Hill, 10016: My old neighborhood. My first apartment. My journey into the Great [Neck] Beyond. Wedged between the Midtown Tunnel and the Long Island Rail Road, Murray Hill is an outpost for young suburbanites in transition.

This is not the same Murray Hill that E.B. White eloquently eulogized in The New Yorker. These are not the same streets Katharine Hepburn walked years ago. The neighborhood no longer trembles beneath the Third Avenue El. Instead, Third Avenue is now overrun with Mexican restaurants advertising brunch specials, sushi joints offering delivery menus, and Happy Hour hotspots where the young and impeccably coiffed sip frozen mango margaritas.

Twenty-somethings from Great Neck and similarly-minded suburbs flock to the high-rise, luxury, doorman buildings east of Fifth Avenue in the Thirties. And, for reasons I couldn't fully appreciate until now, I joined the masses.

I spent years griping about the stifling effects suburbia has on young people hungry for experience. Like many of my peers, I wanted to flee my suburban youth, to become anonymous in the Big Apple, to get lost in the crowd so that I could rediscover, redefine and reinvent myself without anyone noticing. I wanted to be the "urban hipster," the "workaholic," the "life of the party." Anything but the girl from Great Neck. I did become anonymous in Murray Hill, lost in a sea of girls from Great Neck.

Along with two friends from college, I moved into a three-bedroom apartment on 34th Street. None of us had much knowledge of the area. The real estate broker assured my parents that the neighborhood, stretching south from Grand Central to 27th Street, and east from Fifth Avenue to First, was safe. He told me it was "young and hip."

"Young," in this case, was an understatement. According to the most recent census data, 30 percent of the neighborhood population is between the ages of 22 and 30. Citywide, that age bracket accounts for only 14 percent of the total population.

"Murray Hill is young, white and brunette," said Helen Gilbert, a 23-year-old native Chicagoan who now lives at the southernmost boundary of what residents have affectionately deemed "the Hill." "It really is the right-out-of-college crowd," she said, noting that she often meets young people from Long Island around the neighborhood.

"It's very Jewish, a lot of young Jewish kids," added Dan Ahdoot, 25, a Great Neck transplant to Murray Hill.

Ahdoot says he ended up in the Hill when a family friend offered him a great deal on an apartment. Despite his lack of knowledge about the neighborhood, he couldn't refuse. Like many who move to New York from the suburbs in their early 20s, Ahdoot hoped for a broader world view. To his disappointment, Murray Hill seemed all too familiar, perhaps because of the overwhelmingly Great Neck-like scene it offered him.

"You have a little net of friends all around you, from high school and whatever," said Ahdoot, "It's positive at first, but then it's negative because you don't explore the city."

"I got there by chance," he went on, "and I hated it because it was all these Long Island kids. If I wanted this, I would've moved to Middle Neck Road!" I decided not to take this declaration personally. Ahdoot and I grew up as next door neighbors in Great Neck, playing kickball in the cul-de-sac outside our homes, waiting at the bus stop together in the mornings. In Murray Hill, we became neighbors again, our buildings only a short city block apart.

Jennifer Hyman, 23, grew up in Scarsdale, went to sleep-away camp in the Catskills, and isn't afraid to sport her knowledge of, and penchant for, designer fashion. She was raised with the same brand of suburban advantage many associate with Great Neck and other towns on Long Island. Like Ahdoot, however, Hyman expressed disappointment in the Hill's familiar social landscape. And, like me, Hyman believed she had successfully left her affluent suburban lifestyle behind when she got to college.

(To be continued next week.)