Though California pays big for their art, their fanmail comes addressed to NYC!

So, I have about an hour's break between classes and work today because of 3 fire trucks, 5 haz-mat trucks, about 6 cop cars, and one unidentified cardboard box possibly containing a hazardous substance outside of the building of my last class. So I thought I would write about what we did in NYC.

Our plane from Memphis (after waiting 5 hours in the airport) was a 48-seater and I am claustrophobic so I cried for about 30 minutes :( it was not fun. But that was the only bad thing that happened. We took a shuttle from the airport to our hotel and luckily they let us check in early. Our hotel was tiny but very nice and in a really fun part of town. We walked around Greenwich for a few hours, had dinner at a Mexican place, and then saw the off-Broadway show Altar Boyz, which was hilarious.

The next day we went to the Museum of Natural History which Daniel loved. There were 4 floors full of dinosaurs, bugs, rocks, all that kind of thing. Then we had lunch and went to a Columbus Day craft fair. Most of the crafts there were handmade (i.e. really expensive) but we got a few things. We also saw the Dakota, the apartment building where John Lennon lived and was killed. It's still a private apartment building so you can't go in unless you live there. We also spent about 2 hours in Chinatown buying souvenirs and I had a lot of fun doing that. That night we had dinner at a tiny pizza place where you could get about a pound of delicious pasta for 5 bucks. Then we saw an off-off-Broadway show at this tiny underground theatre called Under St. Mark's and the show was called Brew of the Dead. It was about the zombie apocalypse and these 5 people who figure that if they're going to die anyway they might as well drink as much beer as they can before it happens. Their only props were three metal folding chairs with a wrinkly white sheet covering them (the "couch"), a couple fake guns, and a real keg of beer. It was pretty funny for being so low-budget. We also found a tiny bookstore across the street where Daniel got a really old book for $2 that he loves, and I got a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath.

On Sunday I woke up really early to go buy something else at that craft fair and got lost on the subway. I made it all the way into Queens before I figured out I was lost. After I made my way back to the hotel we walked around the fashion side of Manhattan, 5th and Madison. Plus we went to Dylan's Candy Bar, a 3-story candy store owned by the daughter of Ralph Lauren. Then we spent about an hour walking around looking for St. Patrick's Cathedral but it was worth it when we finally found it because it was gorgeous. That night we went out to eat at some bar near Times Square that had the best, crunchiest french fries I have ever had. After that we walked around Times Square and went into the Hershey's store and then went home.

Monday morning we got tickets to go to this museum in the Lower East Side called the Tenement Museum. A tenement is basically an apartment building, and this tenement that we saw was built in the 1860's, closed in the 1940's, and had had around 4,000 immigrants from over 20 countries live in it during that time. It had 20 apartments and each of them were only 325 square feet divided into 3 rooms. Some of the rooms had been redecorated to look like what they would have looked like in the 20's, 1800's, etc, but they left some of them looking like what they looked like when the museum found the building in 1988 (basically a falling-down rat hole). That was really fun. Then we walked around the financial district and Battery Park and we saw the Statue of Liberty but didn't take a ferry out there. There was a huge street fair on Broadway with tons of vendors so we got a lot of food and souvenirs there. Finally we made it back to the airport, where they switched our gate about 3 minutes before the plane took off. It was a tiny plane again but I figured it would be so no crying on the way back. :) My mom and dad picked us up from the airport and we drove home and unloaded the car and I am still staring at all our suitcases and souvenirs on the floor which I don't plan on unpacking until this weekend. :)

We had a lot of fun!