Belated Farewells

So I’ve been home safely for over a week, but just haven’t had time to wrap all this up. I think as a sort of conclusion, I’ll do a run down of some statistics. Because you know I kind of adore statistics. 

Schools visited: Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth, Columbia
List of colleges I’m currently planning on applying to: Princeton, Dartmouth, Clemson 
Colleges I need to look into: Duke, Elon, Davidson, other small colleges in SC
States visited: (North Carolina) New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont

Total miles traveled: 2,294 miles

Transportation counts:

taxi:3
metro: 2
plane: 2
rental cars: 3
trains: 5
bus: 1

Some quick awards:

Best meal: Dinner in Amherst ties with dinner in Dartmouth for tastiest thing ever

Best bed: AMHERST

Worst leg: the 7 hours we spent taking the train from Amherst to New York. Oh my goodness.
Best town: Dartmouth. Duh. I guess technically Hanover, then. It was so quaint and picturesque, but I'm still afraid I'd get cabin fever up there over winter. 
Worst weather: Brown. Ew.
Best weather: Columbia, NY
Favorite form of transport: For this girl who gets motion sick in math class if the desk is uneven? Walking. On flat ground. 
Number One: Princeton. The campus, the dance, the location, just yes. 

Overall, it was a fabulous trip and I’m excited to continue exploring all the possibilites these next few years hold. 

Dancing and Dartmouth

Day 6: Mount Holyoke to Dartmouth to Amherst

11:30am Ballet Class at Mount Holyoke
1:30pm Leave for Dartmouth
6:30pm Head back to Amherst

I'm writing this a day late for several reasons. 1) We didn't get back to Amherst until 9:30 last night and I was too exhausted to think let alone write. 2) It feels pretty fancy to be blogging from a train. 3) The events of yesterday were far too emotional to start analyzing right away, so I've given myself almost 24 hours to just be thinking about the events of yesterday and how I want to handle them. Here goes.

We got to sleep in yesterday and I got ready for a ballet class at Mount Holyoke. We had planned to be touring Amherst, but I also really wanted to take a ballet class. We learned that Amherst is part of a 5 college system. Basically that means you enroll at any one of the 5 and can take classes at the other schools if your home school doesn't provide the class you want. For example, I was looking at amherst, but they didn't have any ballet classes. At all. So we checked the four other colleges that were nearby, and sure enough Mount Holyoke had an intermediate ballet class that I could take. So we drove over to Mount Holyoke (about 20 minutes from Amherst) and my mom fell in love with the campus. It was beautiful but there was just one tiny little problem--all girls school. **shudders** Still, I went and took the class. the girls at this campus were certainly the friendliest I've experienced. They seemed genuinely excited that another dancer was looking into their school and they were excited to talk to me. Several gave me their emails and Facebook information and said to message them if I ever had any questions. So that was pretty neat. 


Non-ballerinas feel free to skip this paragraph:

 That ballet class was so...strange. It was maybe Vaganova? I'm pretty sure we only did one tendu combination. It was our second combination, about half of us were in pointe shoes, and she put a pirouette from fifth in that combination....no balances in retire first...just straight to pirouettes. Then the way she gave combinations was crazy--she would count backwards from 4 to say there were four jetes or whatever. Generally I got the feeling that this teacher wasn't particularly good at tailoring her class for the level of the students. She'd throw in some really hard things that most didn't seem like were technically ready for the step. Especially considering that for some this was their only ballet class per week. There were definitely some very pretty dancers in the class, and I felt like I could hang pretty well. Other than the funkiness of this individual teacher that is. Plus I've been sitting most of the week so it was just a rough class as I threw on pointe shoes and was having trouble finding all my pieces. Also, this week was their last class before their finals, so I had to learn two variations in literally 30 seconds each to try to do them with the second group and it was so much fun. By the time we got to those it felt good to do a whole variation and feel like I could actually dance a bit instead of just having to yell at myself for forgetting to engage core muscles in tendus and things like that.




Okay welcome back. After the ballet class I jumped all hot and sweaty into the car and we started the two hour drive to Hanover, New Hampshire to just see Dartmouth. Unexpected bonus was that we got to drive through Vermont, which was really pretty and it means I can say we visited 7 states in the Northeast this trip! (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire)



So we got to Dartmouth. Just. Wow. I. Can't even. Every school we went to, people were always mentioning a sort of visceral reaction to a campus--an intangible but intense sense that you belonged at this place. I definitely hadn't really had that at any campus. Intellectually, I loved Princeton, and I could absolutely picture myself there, but I didn't have any sort of reaction to it like everyone was saying.

Dartmouth evoked the reaction. I just walked onto that campus and just started laughing. Even now writing about it I feel my heart racing a bit. I didn't have to talk to anyone, go in any buildings, I just knew that I loved it. I really, really love it. 

Still, we went in and talked to an admissions person, got a map, and started walking around. I knew I loved it because all I wanted to do was waltz around the streets. I could barely keep myself together I was so excited about this school! So we did the only natural thing to do and went and got caffeine at the local coffee shop. The coffee? Amazing, of course. Better that the coffee at Harvard. Plus then we just started talking to these two Dartmouth students who were just so excited to talk to us about everyday life in Hanover. I was just captivated. 

There is just one major, MAJOR problem with Dartmouth. No dance. None. And there really isn't even a city I could delude myself into thinking I'd take classes with. There's no ballet. EXCEPT. We were talking with the two students at the coffee shop and I asked about dance at Dartmouth (come on, it's even an alliteration) and they got really excited. Apparently there are a lot of student run groups that do mostly contemporary stuff, but they have a base in ballet. I may be crazy, but it seems like there's the student base with enough interest in an art form like ballet where I could start a student group dedicated to continuing a good ballet education. I dunno. 

My mom put it this way: "I saw in a span of 30 seconds that ballet wasn't the most important thing to you any more." 

I don't really think ballet is any less important to me than it was before this trip, I just think that Dartmouth made me see a whole new world of possibilities that I can be excited about. I'm still a ways away from having to make any huge decisions about the extent to which I'll dance in college, I mean, less than 10% acceptance rate makes it pretty likely I won't even have to make a decision with Dartmouth. Still, it was a really cool experience to feel almost called and connected to a specific school and I'm excited to see all the opportunities and possibilities that'll come in this next year. 

Who knows. Maybe I'll go to Clemson. Maybe I'll go dance with a company for a year somewhere. And hey, maybe I'll bring dance to Dartmouth.

Traveling Impressions

Day 5: Providence to Cambridge to Amherst

6:56am Train leaves for Boston
8:00am Take metro/subway/whatever they call it to Cambridge
11:00am Metro/subway/whatever they call it back to boston
12:00pm Bus leaves for Springfield, Massachusetts
2:15pm Bus leaves for Amherst
3:30pm Rent a car and talk to administrative office at Amherst

Aye que, what a day. Lots of travel. I barely remember waking up in Providence this morning. OH WAIT. Yes I do! My glorious mother who is wise in all things has the amazing ability to read a ticket that says "departure 6:56am" as "departure 7:25am" and due to this slight oversight I got to hear the wondrous phrase, "Oh wait. We have to leave in four minutes," as I'm leisurely brushing my teeth. Oh the joy. A rushed ride to the train station and running to catch the train immediately followed, though we jumped on board just in the nick of having 10 minutes to spare. So we were fine. But still, woah, rough start. After that we had just over an hour train ride that was absolutely painless. Except for the sun that was blaring in my eyes the whole time. The terrain seemed to be getting prettier, but I couldn't see anything but brightness, so I randomly snapped some pictures and wasn't disappointed with the view:

This one shows the brightness pretty well. I couldn't actually look directly into that. 

See? The landscape is actually becoming pretty now.











So we got to Boston, and though we didn't see much, my first impression was good. Seemed like a bright and exciting city that I'd love to see more of sometime. We jumped on the metro (I think it's called the T in Boston, but I think of it as a metro, so I'm just sticking with that terminology) and headed over to Cambridge to visit Harvard. I have absolutely zero intention of applying to Harvard, but it seemed like a shame to not go see it seeing as we were so close. And boy, I'm glad we went--I liked it a lot better than I was expecting. Cambridge is really a pretty little city and there was just something classy about the whole experience. Maybe it was just the historic nature of the area that evoked almost a patriotic sentiment to the town. 

Take this for instance (I had to make it really big so you could read the inscription). This building existed before the Revolutionary War. What? This building is older than The United States of America. It's hard to not feel patriotic when you see it--it's been here through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq. It's survived everything. Blows my mind.


Because I'm on a history rant here, I'll show this building next:

It's pretty interesting to look at, I think. It is primarily a Civil War memorial. It dedicated 3-5 lines per person who was associated with Harvard (student, donor, professor etc.) who died in the Civil War. Each inscription gave the year of death, the person's name, the person's birthday, and the battle in which they died. It was pretty somber. Interesting tidbit we overheard from a tour guide: Only Northern soldiers who died are given an inscription even though some Harvard grads or professors fought for the confederates. That sort of broaches an uncomfortable debate. One one side, the individual deaths of the Confederate soldiers are just as tragic as the deaths of a Union soldier and their lives deserve some sort of veneration. On the other hand, it would have felt really wrong to the people who were creating this memorial to honor the enemy along with the "good guys." I guess it just made me consider our definitions of good and evil. While I definitely believe the North was in the moral right, it is hard to just classify all of the southerners as racists who should be obliterated from our preservation of memories from this war. Defining one side as wholly good or wholly evil is especially hard when both sides share a common background, either as Americans or as affiliates of the same school. Okay philosophical tangent over. 

Harvard.

This felt very Harvard to me: the silent quad, the overlooking chapel, the logically symmetrical and highly colonial architecture. 











After our mostly historical tour of the campus we headed back to Boston and caught a train to Springfield. Springfield isn't particularly significant. For us it was just a pretty sketchy bus station that served as a transfer spot to get on a different bus to Amherst. 

Yeah those would be rusted nails just poking through the roof. I was confused.











Then we started driving to the middle of nowhere. It was so beautiful.

We got into Amherst at this dinky little bus station and walked to go rent a car:

The town of Amherst is just adorable. I think every town we've gone to has been prettier than the next. Providence is prettier than Princeton; Boston prettier than Providence; Cambridge prettier than Boston; Amherst prettier than Cambridge. It feels truly small college town--the only reason anyone would be in Amherst has some relation to the school. Plus then when we got to the admissions office, this was the view from the parking lot:

Amherst as a place is just charming. We tour the school and get into the nitty gritty details then, but it really is just a lovely area and I'm excited to learn more about the school itself in the morning. 

Brown: True New England

Day 4: Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)

9:00am Campus Tour
10:10am Information Session
1:00pm Introduction to Microbiology
5:00pm Return Rental Car

~~~Relax~~~

I awoke this morning at a reasonable time and felt well-rested which was a welcomed change of pace. An unwelcome change came with the weather. It is mid-April and we walked out to this mess:

Really...?












Woefully unprepared for this New England welcome, my mom and I froze our way through an campus tour. No pictures from this as my hands were too cold to safely hold my phone. I'll do my best to paint a word picture, though.

Brown felt very much like Charleston--reminiscent of an old town that doesn't want to change but compromises to stay modern enough to survive. The architecture of Brown was much cleaner and more symmetrical than the amalgam of architectural styles at Princeton which just gave it a very different feel. It was also significantly more urban than Princeton and it was less obvious what was Brown and what was just city. They had several green open areas very comparable to the Horseshoe at USC, though I'd imagine the greens at Brown are only pleasant for 3 or 4 months of the year. There certainly wasn't anyone out studying today (High was 43 F). Throughout the whole day, I felt pretty ambivalent about the campus and school as a whole. Don't get me wrong the academics absolutely are everything they are held to be, there was just something intangible about the campus that made it impossible for me to feel like I could ever be happy attending Brown. 

This was perhaps best exemplified in the class I got to take this afternoon: Introduction to Microbiology

The specific seminar was something like: "Animal/arthropod and soil borne transmitted diseases" which basically means the professor talked about Lyme disease and malaria for the majority of the 80 minute class. It was a smaller class--about 50 students--which definitely changed the dynamic of the conversation. Students actually asked and answered questions and the professor had a fabulous sense of humor. There were several other prospective students at this class and I was absolutely appalled by their attitude. I have to be careful here because I know I am absolutely a pretentious snob when it comes to academics (okay, when it comes to pretty much anything...) but I really REALLY hope I didn't come across as assuming and self-righteous as these other prospective students did. But the thing that really didn't settle right with me is how these students somehow seemed to fit in with the culture of Brown as a whole. 

I'm not really sure how to explain this, but there was just something cold about the whole experience. Very much like "we will grace you with a few moments of our attention because it's good for public relations." There were absolutely exceptions to this that I feel I must note. I spoke very briefly with the professor and he was clearly very excited to meet prospective students and made me feel very welcome in his class. Also, our tour guide was very engaging and clearly just loved Brown. She spoke a little about her reasons for choosing Brown, and ultimately it was because when she walked on campus it perfectly matched her perception of what college should be like. That was absolutely not the case for me. The buildings felt foreboding and almost oppressive--much like the Puritan model on which they are based. Maybe this was to be expected from New England, but I'm hopeful for Amherst tomorrow. 

I think my mom summed it all up best when she said, "Brown feels truly New England. Princeton is Old England." 

Now that I feel like I've only had negative things to say about Brown, here's some nice things that I really did appreciate. Brace yourself, I'm about to go full nerd crazy here. First, this building.

Not the short one in the foreground, but the tallest one in the picture. Actually, if my memory is correct, I believe the top of that building is the highest point in Providence. Kind of cool. But not nearly as cool as the fact that for many years, Brown held the record for the largest game of Tetris when some students did a light show on the side of the building that allowed people to play Tetris on the side of the building. Okay a little cooler. BUT THEN, this building is a library that has exactly 14 floors so logically, each floor is color coded according to the pH scale. 

They say as you go up the books get more basic.




I didn't get a picture of this next one because that would have been creepy, but I saw a sweatshirt that had this design on it:

I'm sure these are all over the place, but it pretty much made my day. For less nerdy/non-mathemetically inclined persons here's a few translations:
Simplified math: i 8 sum pi and it was delicious.
English:  I ate some pie and it was delicious.






Then I saw design outside the chemistry lecture hall (didn't get a picture so I stole this from the internet):

That was also pretty exciting...







Okay, so what can I learn from all this?
1) I don't like urban campuses. I really like feeling like I'm at this specific physical place that is the college, rather than this general area where the college intermingles with the rest of the city. 
2) Dance is a deal breaker. There is NO ballet at Brown. At all. I'd have to create a ballet club, which would rely on people just looking to do something recreationally. Yikes. Not at all what I'm looking for. Now that I know there are colleges that accommodate various levels of classic ballet training, there's no way I could go to a college where I couldn't at least maintain my technique if not advance my studies. 
3) Practically, I don't need to worry about applying to Brown. It is officially off the list.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Day 3: Princeton to Providence

8:30am Introduction to Molecular and Cellular                Biology lecture at Princeton 
10:27am Train to Penn Station(NYC)
2:00pm Train to Providence

~~~Relax~~~

So my day started with voluntarily taking a biology class. It had probably 200 students in an auditorium for 80 minutes and was titled "Chromatin and Epigenetics: genomic control of eukaryotic gene regulation." It was the most amazing thing ever. The professor moved pretty quickly, and even without any context I was able to follow along no problem. AP Biology covered pretty much everything I needed to understand his new points. There wasn't anything I had already learned specifically, but he never said any terms I wasn't familiar with, and I felt like I really understood everything he said. Whenever he asked questions, I didn't know the answer, but when he gave it I understood why it was right. Basically, I felt like I have the background that I could take that class and do just fine, which only made me super excited. That on top of the fact that the subject matter was just fascinating to begin with. Also, unlike any biology class I've ever taken, this professor never said "so these random people did this insane project that determined how to sequence an entire human genome in 24 hours." Instead he said, "so these buddies of mine..." or, "I worked on this project some number of years ago..." It was really amazing. Never enjoyed class so much. 

In terms of the students, most of them arrived about 4 minutes before class started, every single one of them had their computer out, the majority had his notes on their screens, others scrolled through tumbler. There was a constant pitter-patter of keyboards typing throughout the lecture--sounded rather like a quiet rain. 

Speaking of rain, today was a very wet day for the Northeastern coast. But that was okay because after that class today was solely a travel day. So far this week I've traveled by plane, taxi, foot, train, metro, and rental car. It's been nice because you get to see many different perspectives of the Northeast. 

First by plane: 

This was my view from the plane to New York as we flew over what I'm pretty sure was the Chesapeake Bay. Overall I was not stunned by the view from the plaen. Highly industrialized, very few green spaces, mostly brown yuckiness.  That impression is probably amplified by the fact that spring hasn't really bloomed here yet. 

By taxi: 

I didn't take any pictures from the taxi in New York because I was terrified and borderline carsick. This is from a taxi this morning coming from Princeton to the train station where we rode back to Penn station. This took us out by the countryside a little bit and we got to see some pretty flowers. 

By foot:

This is really my view most of the time as I'm so klutzy I have to watch my feet whenever they're in a parallel position. My shins are dying from walking up the big hill at Princeton yesterday. 

Whenever I managed to look up from my feet in NYC, however, I would see something like this:

This was totally worth the trip. Both the actual journey to NYC, but mainly the stumble over my feet that occurred when I stopped looking at them to look at this view. 

By train:

This is the train station at Princeton. Mom compared it to the Siberia station in Fiddler on the roof, though I find that to be a considerable exaggeration. Still, it was pretty sketchy and poorly maintained. It was functional, though. 

This is from the inside of one of the nice trains. They have real live guys who come up and down the cars with hole punches and they do the crazy fast hole punching thing like in the Polar Express and it's the greatest thing ever. 

I love the trains in particular because they're really comfortable. They have plenty of leg room, a desk to work (sleep) on, and have nicely cushioned seats. Today I was over-excited from my little escapade into collegiate science and tried to do some chemistry on my 3.5 hour ride to Providence, but to very little avail. For starters, my handwriting looks like I was on some sort of insane drug...

and then the consequent motion sickness I had to deal with for the next 5 hours was NOT worth the 45 minutes of work I did get done on the train.

Failed academic attempts aside, I really enjoy the train rides, particularly because of all the different landscapes. 

Right out of NYC I saw these fields of something. They don't look maintained or anything, but they were pretty in their own regards.

But then there's this unsightly mess of industry right outside of NYC:

                                                                                                           

Then today I got my first glimpse of true New England, and the weather obliged to create the exact stereotype I've had in my mental image of these northern states. 

Then just as an added bonus, we happened to see this beauty:

It's hard to see because I was trying to take a picture through a window covered in rain droplets, but the boat in the back ground is a U.S. Coast Guard ship that wikipedia informs us is still in operation. It has three masts and is actually run in the good old fashioned way--wind power. How cool. 

Overall, I'm enchanted with New England. Providence is much prettier than the town of Princeton, but more details on that to come tomorrow after our foray into Brown University. 

There's something quaint and almost archaic about this New England society and the accents are just amazing. I'm constantly thinking of one of the first books I ever fell in love with--The Witch of Blackbird Pond--which is a story about a young girl (named Katherine) from Barbados who moves to Massachusetts to live with Puritans. I still remember her descriptions of the coast of America as cold and disappointing, yet mysteriously appealing despite its surface. This whole feeling was captivated for me in the view from the train coming into Rhode Island. It was cold and rainy and gross, but there was something still beautiful about it. Maybe you'll see what I mean:

Princeton: America's Hogwarts

Day 2: Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey)

7:25am Train to Princeton Junction

8:20am Rent a car and drive to Princeton University

12:00pm Co-curricular ballet class

3:30pm Guided tour of campus

5:30pm Meet with Emily Knott

8:00pm Arrive at hotel 

Wow. Just. Wow. What a beautiful day. First, the weather was gorgeous, which just made everything seem more pleasant. But Princeton is just a beautiful school. And huge. Oh my goodness. It was something like 500 acres of a centralized campus. The buildings were stunning--such an amalgam of architectural styles I've never before seen. 

First you have this sort of building. It's modern. It's amazing. It's beautiful. It has lots of books in it. I love it. 

Then you turn around and see this.                                                    

Yeah this is where I took my ballet class. 

Then you turn around again and find that the Greco-Roman Empire threw Princeton a souvenir. 

Just the admissions office.

Go inside the buildings and you'll find normal things like books, offices, classrooms, tyrannosaurus rex, lecture halls, cafeterias, oh wait what? 

Don't mind me, I'm just a 40 foot long dinosaur skeleton-- perfectly complete and made of actual fossilized bone. Not a replica. Not synthetic. Just the real thing straight out of the ground. Except for the skull. They keep the real skull somewhere else because it's too heavy to hang on display. 

So yeah. I was impressed. 

Now for the ballet class: 

The ballet class I took was really amazing. My back is being all spastic and cramping again, so it was an unusually painful class, but still really good. The class was a walk-in. That simply means you didn't have to be in the dance program or anything, you could just walk in whenever you wanted to take class. It was insanely cool. 

We talked with the dance director afterwards and she explained that Princeton doesn't offer a major in dance, they only offer certificates (which are basically equivalent to a minor). But in addition to curricular classes (courses you sign up and pay for), they offer technical modern and ballet classes every day, Monday through Friday, at 12:00 for anyone who wants to come. With this set up, you can take as many or as few ballet classes a week. 

Theoretically, I could sign up for 1 curricular class which would be 6 hours of classes a week and take an additional 5+ hours of the walk in classes whenever I could. But come finals week or the deadline for a major paper, there would be no pressure to come to the additional classes as they are completely optional and completely free.

 Overall, I got the impression that dancing at Princeton is whatever you want it to be. It could prepare you for a professional career after college, or it could just be recreational. They have several performance opportunities and there are a lot of student dance groups on campus that I could join. Basically, their program is designed  so that you don't have to choose between continuing an intense dance education and a rigorous academic life. I'm pretty much in love with how this is set up because it entirely removes the apparent ultimatum of choosing between dance and school. Or at least it delays it another four years. 

For ballerinas: The style was described as "American ballet" and I felt right at home in the studio. I didn't notice any really obscure terminology and there certainly wasn't anything I had never seen before. One interesting little twist with this teacher is that with the exception of center adage, we did everything twice--once slow, once faster. This teacher also gave really simple exercises as far as remembering them goes, but they were killer. She was also really good about giving corrections. She didn't give many to the visiting students, though she did correct my hyperextended elbow in the arabesque line. She also gave the "correction" (though it's really more of a personal preference that I didn't pick up from her mark) that she prefers to land pirouettes in attitude to the corner, rather than directly side. One last thing--the studios. I fit in a HUGE tombe pas de bourre glissade and four, yes four, grande jetes in one side for grande allegro and almost died I was so happy. Okay that's it. 

Overall, I absolutely adored Princeton. I love the campus, the environment, the culture, the noise level (it was so quite all over campus), the fact that its residential, the dance program, and I mean you can't question the caliber of the academics. It's Princeton. The only drawback I have is the fact that all of their majors are really specific. You can't major in Biology, you have to pick evolutionary biology or molecular biology. It does seem, however, that while their system for majors is a little more structured than most places, it emphasizes diversity and becoming all around well educated. They require that every student become proficient (4-5 semesters usually) in a foreign language, and they don't allow you to declare a major before your junior year. It's certainly a system I could live with. Out of ten, Princeton is probably a 9.5,  or--more realistically-- out of 2pi, it's an 11pi/6. 

Yeah. I'm sold. 

It's Smaller on the Inside

Day 1: Columbia to New York

8:00am Leave for Charlotte

11:45am Flight leaves for New York

2:00pm Arrive in New York City      

          ~~~Explore~~~

I read somewhere unreliable on the internet that Einstein believed in time travel. Ultimately time travel is the ability to get from one point in space to another point in space in little or no time at all. According to this fallible source, Einstein believed a bicycle was a time machine as it decreased the amount of time it takes to get from point A to point B. Thus you have a time machine. Granted it only goes in the forward direction--it doesn't go backwards in time--but it is a contraption that allows for really long distance travel in an unrealistic amount of time. 

On Sunday, April the 13th of 2014 I woke up in my own commodious, yet disheveled bedroom. 14 hours later, I was asleep in the tiniest, though impressively clean, hotel room in the most obscure corner of New York City. I swear this is time travel. If you're still doubtful, consider this. The hotel room didn't have free Wi-Fi. Time travel. 

The point is that I am amazed at the freedom with which we are able to travel such distances so quickly. I mean to wake up in some small town in South Carolina and to fall asleep 900 meters from the Empire State building? That's hard to get my brain around. Okay nerdy tangent over. Into the details. 

I'll spare you description of the traveling itself as it was relatively uneventful--as traveling is hoped to be. Uneventful, but still exhausting so when we found our hotel we got in the tiniest elevator I've ever seen and collapsed into bed. 

Photo evidence of tiniest elevator (look in the overhead mirror in the top rightish of the photo):

After our brief repose we talked ourselves into getting out to see the city because you know, it's New York. So we went out and got some lunch/dinner. We made a promise to not eat at any chain restaurant, only local places and we ended up at a walk in, walk out sort of Chipotle style Thai food place that was amazingly delicious. After fueling up we walked to Penn Station which, you sports fans will enjoy, also happens to be Madison Square Garden. (Who am I kidding? None of my friends care about that.) Anyways. We found Penn Station and figured out how to catch a train so we were prepared for the next morning. After that we just walked around looking for a convenience store so we could buy some basic things that weren't allowed on the airplane and also for some good walking shoes. 

After we found all that business (which took FOREVER) we realized we were super close to the Empire State Building, so we went to go see it. It's not as impressive up close. Mostly because you can't see the top, so it just looks as tall as the other buildings. Still we figured it'd be cool to go up to the top so we went and asked about tickets, saw the price, laughed, and left. We did get this picture, though. 

After that we got some New York Pizza, Flan, and went to bed because yikes what a day. 

I think the biggest thing I noticed about New York was how small it is. Because everything is so incredibly huge on a macro-scale, when it comes down to the function of everyday life, everything has to be small in order to fit everything. Well except for the pizza slices. From the hotel room, to the elevator, to the restaurants, everything is so compressed that you constantly feel claustrophobic. At least I did. Logically, it makes sense, because density and stuff but on some basic level, it's almost counterintuitive--in such a big city life is compressed to be oh so small.