This post is quite late because um.................. I'm lazy. but I went to New York for three days with family! This was my first time visiting. Initial impression was that it was extremely loud and extremely crowded and people love to honk their horns. Despite all these things, I ended up having a great time and the food was SOOO good.
I always thought the NYC craze was a little silly (especially with how expensive it is to rent a place there!), but unfortunately after seeing it in person I completely get it. You don't need a car and there is always something to do. The bagels are so good it's unbelievable. Like yeah... this kind of rules 😔
I also took this as an opportunity to test out my new Camp Snap camera, which I found out about while surfing around Neocities and impulse bought right before the trip. It's a digital camera without a screen designed to give you crunchy jpegs that look like they were taken on film. I think mostly it's meant to take off the pressure of getting perfect shots for social media, but I just like that it's simple and you get to press a button. What can I say... I love a good gadget.
Anyway, day 1 we didn't do too much except check into the hotel and rest for a couple hours. My dad found a comedy show for us to go to and then forced us to walk like half an hour to go get pizza.
No picture of the pizza because I was so hungry by this point that I just tore into it like a rabid animal. Here's my bagel though
The screens in Times Square were bright enough that it was almost like daylight.
Day 2 was the Met!!
We started in the Greek/Roman section (my little sister is in her Percy Jackson phase), but skipped ahead to see the American section after that because I wanted to look for John Singer Sargent. I know jack shit about art history, but I read a bit about him after seeing one of his paintings at the Seattle Art Museum last year. The Met has his most (in)famous painting, Portrait of Madame X, which to my understanding was kind of a huge scandal when it came out because it showed so much skin.
The controversy got so bad that he ended up moving out of France, but apparently when he sold it to the Met like 30 years later he called it "the best thing I have ever done", which I'm genuinely pleased to hear. I think if you're going to make weird crazy art you should stand by it.
My other favorite from this trip was "King Lear," Act I, Scene I by Edwin Austin Abbey. Never heard of him but he slayed this one.
how it feels going to the art museum in your 20s
After that we left to go see Central Park and check out all the shops nearby. The St. Patrick's Day parade was in full swing (remember when I said this post was late. lmao).
I think it was around this point that we went back to the hotel before dinner and I changed the filter file on my camera, hoping it would come out cool, and ended up messing up a lot of my pictures for the next day because it was stronger than I thought it'd be. But here's a phone picture of our KBBQ.
Day 3 we did a free tour of the New York Public Library, but the ugly filter plus the constant moving around meant my pictures were all kinda jank.
It's giving 2012 Instagram sorry to say
It was a beautiful library, but I wouldn't call it particularly comfortable. Felt like it was more for studying or doing research than hanging around to read fiction (this is what I like to do at public libraries). But I guess that's also just how old buildings are. Maybe there were rooms we didn't see that would be more suited to wasting time for fun.
At the end of the day we had probably my most anticipated part of the trip--we saw Hadestown! On Broadway!
It's not the original cast anymore, but I knew next to nothing about this show going in so I had no specific expectations. The people playing Eurydice and Hermes in particular were phenomenal... It made me wish I could listen to them specifically when I went to look up the album afterwards.
Not much else to say about the show (if only because I wrote a whole essay on it for an elective right after) but I love bittersweet endings. Something about stage plays being almost like timeloops... Something about having hope that they'll escape tragedy just this once, even as you watch them march to their doom in real time... Something about Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead...
That's basically it. It was a good trip. I don't want to drag this one out any longer because I've already put off posting it for more than a month now. Stay safe out there, OK?