Tourist Time

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.

 She left a few hours before I did on Thursday, with a bag of bagels to bring back to her family in Georgia, and the desire to come back to the city because she didn’t get enough of it in one visit.  I’m spoiled, because I have plenty of time left here, and maybe also deceived in believing that any amount of time here is plenty.