I’ve fallen short in my blogging efforts these last few
weeks due largely to A) work, B) pre-spring break busyness, and C) spring break
computer avoidance. The week
before spring break, my lovely friend Deenene came to stay with me. For the final semester of her graduate
program next spring, she’ll get to do an internship wherever she wants, and since she’d
never been to New York, she decided to spend her spring break visiting to see
if she wanted to apply for internships here. You remember just how massive New York City is when you sit
down with someone who’s never been here and try to come up with a 7 day
itinerary to cram it all in.
It was also a reminder of all I still haven’t done, having
bypassed most tourist attractions for the routine of school, work, cooking, and
coffee shops. Which isn’t to say I
don’t like my routine. I love
cooking, and have no desire to eat out every meal. But it’s a misfortune that I live in a city with some of the
best restaurants in the country and have eaten at hardly any of them. I love wandering aimlessly without an
itinerary, but it means I’ve missed some of the best museums and exhibits in
the world. I save all the money I
can, but as a result, I’ve seen exactly 1 Broadway show, and only 2 shows total
(if you count Sleep No More as a show), and both of those were when visitors
were staying with me and coerced me into splurging. I haven’t been to the top of the Empire State Building or
gone to the Statue of Liberty or been to all the museums. I feel like those are things for
visitors to do, and that maybe I’ll do them eventually.
Deenene was the best kind of visitor, because she was excited
about everything. Everything. She was as excited about a bargain
skirt, the candy store, window shopping, and her mango and avocado yogurt at
Chobani Soho as she was about the MET, the new Aladdin musical, the Empire
State Building, and Times Square. I was busy with work and school, so I experienced most of her
New York exploration vicariously through texts filled with exclamation marks
and pictures. But I was free on
Tuesday afternoon, when the temperature reached 60 for the first time this
year. The two of us met downtown
to join the masses walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, after which we sat down for
the traditional post-bridge-pizza at Grimaldi’s, neither of which I’d ever done
before. And though the bridge was so crowded that I kept almost getting hit by bicycles, and we agreed that Grimaldi's was far from the so-called “best pizza
in New York” (or anywhere), it was well worth the experience. Deenene’s inexhaustible enthusiasm
reminded me that it’s worth the occasional splurge (of time and money) to make
the most of being here. 
