Experience #14 New York City

For my entire life, my dream has been to live in New York City. At thirteen, I had it all planned out. I would live in this high rise apartment, work this fancy job that made me famous (what can I say, I was a teenager), and be single for the rest of my life ( I must have known something at thirteen that I forgot later on). With all my expert planning though, I’ve never made it to the city. So when I made my list of thirty three experiences, it took me all of two seconds to add it to my list.

The Adventure Begins

My long overdue trip to New York City began with an airplane ride. I have only flown once, and that occurred thirteen years ago. Riding in an airplane is like riding the Dumbo ride at Disney World. My insides twist and turn on the way up, but settle as soon as we are in the air. All the while I’m in the air though, I dread the decent of the landing. (I must add that Dumbo’s landing is much more graceful.)

On the way to New York at takeoff, my paranoia kicked in when a grinding of gears sounded loudly beneath the plane. I immediately blurted out, “What’s that?”

Donna laughed. “I don’t hear anything. You might hear something, but I don’t hear anything.”

Hmmm…. That sums up our differences. Denial vs. paranoia.

On the way home, I was randomly selected at security to go through special screening. The security guard swiped my hands with what looked like a moist band aide.

Curiosity won out after the initial fear of what kind of special screening I’d have to go through subsided. “What are you checking for?”

“Explosives.”

“Oh,” I said. My mind ran through all the things I’d touched that morning. It wasn’t like I’d touched explosives; I didn’t even like fireworks. But what if something I’d touched caused that test to be positive (Did I mention yet that I’m paranoid?)

“If you didn’t make a bomb this morning, then you don’t have to worry.” He said before nodding that I could go.

I laughed in relief and hauled out of the security section to make sure he didn’t come up with some other test to try.

Lost in New York City, otherwise known as the Harry Potter Exhibit

My first real day in New York City, Donna decided to go to school with her daughter who lives and teaches music at a school in the city. This meant that I was on my own for most of the day. I wasn’t going to waste a day in the city not seeing the sights just because I was alone and had never been in the city.

The two of us got off the subway and exited right on the street that I needed to go to my first sight, the Harry Potter exhibit. She instructed me to go right and that she had to go left. I was thirty minutes early and confident that I could make my way there. I even took a stroll through a three-story Toys-R-Us, feeling assured that I had time to spare and I would have no trouble getting there.

I headed off in search of the Harry Potter exhibit, walking down Forty-Fourth Street, thinking that New York wasn’t much different than New Orleans, just much larger. After the second block, I began to worry that I had passed it up or that I was on the wrong street. I checked the address again, and that’s when I realized that I had been sent in the wrong direction. Just to make sure, I walked to the end of the third block and confirmed that I was walking in the wrong direction. When I finally made it to the Harry Potter exhibit, I realized two things. One was that I only had to walk three hundred feet from the subway station to get to the exhibit, and two was that I needed to purchase a map.

The front of the Harry Potter Exhibit. We were not allowed to take
pictures inside. Otherwise, I would have had a difficult time
choosing a picture.

The exhibit was worth it though. The exhibit contained hundreds of movie props such as costumes, wands, beds from the dormitories, books, classroom items, etc. It was like walking onto the movie set, but it was all the movie sets combined. Most importantly though, the exhibit ended in a gift shop. It was in that gift shop that I had the realization that my son’s love of Harry Potter parephenilla may come because he knows I will never tell him no when Harry Potter is involved. I would have been in an enormous amount of trouble if he would have been there. As it were, I spent an exhoberent amount of money, and he was thrilled when I returned home with his two bags of Harry Potter items.

After I left the exhibit, I stopped in and bought me a map before heading down to Fifth Avenue where I spent the next several hours shopping. My first stop was H&M. I’d wanted to shop there since I first spotted the items in a fashion magazine. I’d gone online, and realized that they didn’t sell their items online nor had any stores in our great state of Louisiana. Of course, that just made me want to shop there even more and to notice how frequently they were mentioned in magazines. I spent at least an hour going through the three floors of the store. I tried on tons of clothes and left with a few new outfits to remember the experience with. I left reluctantly, knowing it would be a long time before I was able to shop there again, but then I proceeded to make up for it by going through all the other stores I recognized on the way. I was loaded down with shopping bags by the time I met back up with Donna and her daughter in Times Square. It was definitely a great first day in New York City.

The trip will continue….. Check back soon.