I completely agree with you, small towns are so peaceful and boring I crave big city excitement! And yes it is quite unbelievable at first. The very first time I went there, I stepped out of the Times Square subway station and thoungt "Is this real?"
Madrid seems quite nice too though, even though it is somewhat smaller. The thing about European cities is they have such beautiful old buildings from hundreds of years ago, and all we have here is modern glass and steel buildings which are quite boring sometimes. The only thing that European cities lack is that they have only a little or sometimes no tall buildings at all, which I couldn't live without
I'm sure maybe there's a few skyscapers in Madrid, maybe in a financial district or something?
But of course no city could beat New York for skyscrapers, there's just so many.

P.S. Do you have any pictures of your Peugeot? I would be interested to see it