Let’s talk about New York.
My sister is living there right now, going to school for musical theater. She’ll be back in LA next year, and then probably back to New York again.
My parents flew us all out to see her for Thanksgiving, since my mom was the only one of us who had ever been to the city.
I love big cities. I love them so much I’d live in one in a heartbeat. My first choices would be Paris and NYC, though San Francisco would also be acceptable. (No thank you to LA or Los Vegas. And SLC does not count.) Given that I’ll probably never actually move to a big city (them being so expensive, us being able to work from anywhere, and our community here being so great it’s impossible to leave) I really love to visit.
New York City is my kind of city. Places have a feel to them. I grew up near San Francisco, and I love the feel of that city. Paris feels old, with generations of architecture layered over each other like a post modern text. (Credit for that analogy goes to my parisian travelling companion Emily, but it’s never left me.) LA and Vegas feel more fake, more planned, more recent.
New York feels old and alive. Drew and I did a lot of my favorite kind of touring–just walking around the streets looking at stuff.
And taking pictures, if course. Because that’s what we do. (I’ve given up on not looking like tourists–but I comfort myself that we look like tourists in our own town, too. Maybe we just need better cameras to be taken seriously.)
Central park is every bit as awesome as Golden Gate Park, which up until now was my very favorite place in the states. (That area on the Seine between the Latin Quarter and Notre Dame being my favorite place in the world.)
New York wanted a lot of black and white. I’d like to explain why, but I don’t think I can. Maybe the pictures do it for me.
We looked at lots of art, which is another of our favorite things to do. (The other day we walked around IKEA, and three days later I realized we treated the whole thing like a giant piece of installation art. Either we’re diseased, or our three humanities degrees between us really did their job.)
We treated the armor exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art like a mini sculpting reference. Same for the classic sculpture. Again, diseased.
I couldn’t get over the cop uniforms. I’ve never seen officers actually wear such formal uniforms–like something out of the movies. I suppose the rhetorical function is pretty important in a city that big, though.
My sister has been obsessed with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade since she was little. So we dragged ourselves out of bed at an ungodly hour of the morning and sat on the street for hours. I stared at this street sign for so long, I finally had to take a picture of it.
Of course, it didn’t seem like as many hours to me, because I spent much of the morning doing this:
I think my family was annoyed with me, but the tired Janci does not care.
The parade, I have to say, looks much cooler on TV. I still had fun taking bizzare photos of the freakishly large smurfs and so forth, because, again, that’s what I do. (Incidentally, the level of my boredom is directly proportional to the number of pictures I take. Therefore I don’t really have pictures of the interesting stuff. Oh well.)
Despite my sarcasm, we had fun.
Alisha came with us to the southern end of Manhattan to look at the statue of liberty. We goofed off there for a while.
My Dad took us to the top of Rockafeller center at night, which was so worth it for this view of the city. I almost wished we’d hauled the tripod along. Almost. (This is Drew’s photo. Lights are his thing.)
Looking up at buildings was a major theme.
As was people watching.
And laughing at this.
As if.
The museum of modern art was featuring an exhibit of Tim Burton’s art, which was actually the most interesting thing in the museum. (This is speaking highly of the Burton exhibit, not slighting the moma.)
We saw two Broadway shows. The first night we were there we did the standby lottery and got all five of us into In The Heights. (There were about 50 people there and they only had 12 tickets or so…this was quite the miracle.) The show was truly excellent. The next night Drew and I went to see Next To Normal (also excellent) while the rest of my family went to The Lion King.
We wandered around Times Square. Drew took more pictures of lights.
By far the coolest thing about the city was the concentration of awesome things. We were wandering through the park and saw a monument thing. We wandered over to see what it was, and found an obelisk. From Egypt. You don’t just find things like that randomly outside big cities.
I want to go back already.
The end.
