The Aunts take Manhattan

So Josh is right. I am lazy, and I ain't got no alibi. But I have reason to be lazy this week: we just finished having 2 1/2 weeks of guests in our funky New York life! We were pretty much 24-hour party people. There is a small qualification to make about all these guests--they are all related to me. Every year, my family plans and executes an extended vacation that begins in New York City and often ventures into other neighboring areas. Last year it was Washington, DC; this year it was a return to Palmyra and Niagara Falls.

This year's trip began with my sister Haylee,


my Mom (on right), and her two sisters Gina (center) & Julie (left)

arriving on our doorstep at about 11:45 PM on a Thursday night. From there on, our adventures included a trip out to Ellis Island and the Statue (which we've never done before...I liked the museum), dancing and dinner at a sidewalk cafe in Little Italy, chocolate overload at Max Brenner, delicious Dominican food at El Malecon, dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum (where we naturally underpaid), and, finally, Central Park, where I took a series of photos which my aunt Gina said made it look like I was the gimpy friend in an after-school special, and they had to take me out with them to fulfill a personal progress goal in Young Women's. Whew, that was a long sentence! Well, gentle readers, if you come visit us in New York, you will get a long sentence of your own on this illustrious blog.




Hearkening back to my earlier confession that I am, indeed, lazy, when we were at the Natural History Museum, we had to take pictures of all the characters in the movie Night at the Museum so Gina could take them home to her kids, Gabi and Kai. After spending two hours in the museum, we were too tired and L-A-Z-Y to walk up more flights of stairs to finish the photo list, so we just took photographs of the pictures on the wall map. Who can tell? Not me, that's for sure (observe photo at left).


Another highlight was a bizarre festival that had shut down Little Italy, allowing revelers to walk wantonly through the middle of the streets without a care and shop owners and restauranteurs to fully take over the sidewalks. In the midst of the parades celebrating some monk-looking individual (it was the Feast of Saint so-and-so), there was gelato aplenty, carnival games, and, for some bizarre reason, a really bad rag-tag band that had taken over a parking lot and was giving a concert. Now, the members of the band did not, individually, seem so bad. But the combination of them all created a horrifying cacophony of ungodly sound (most inappropriate at a saint's feast). But people started dancing, and what could I, as a true drama geek, do? Dance, of course! With my aunt Gina and this guy:Don't I look real comfortable having a picture taken with this stranger? Anyway, it was fun, magical, and a little Italian.

This trip also included our yearly pilgrimage to Chinatown to buy cheap knockoff goods. But this somehow lacked some of its past magic. Perhaps it was when a shopkeeper told me and my sister to move away from the sunglasses and let other people have a turn looking (we are not large girls and it was a very large wall of sunglasses. Plus, we had only been looking at them for about 10 minutes. Plus, we were just about to buy three pairs. You can bet we didn't!). Or maybe it was when another shopkeeper pushed Haylee away from the front of the booth. But probably it was when that same woman approached my aunt Julie. Julie is a rather no-nonsense woman who doesn't really care for Chinatown all that much. When Julie told the lady she didn't want to buy anything, the lady replied, "I don't want you to buy! You move!" A few minutes later, another seller approached Julie. The previous lady warned him off: "Don't sell to her! She crazy!"





Luckily, we got away from the crazy in Central Park, where we relaxed on the Bethesda Fountain and watched Thoth in the distance. It was a lovely end to a stupendous visit.











Sadly, after only four days, the aunts had to go home. But don't you worry, gentle readers! We just traded them for my little brother Seth

and headed up north to Niagara Falls and Palmyra, a post for another day...

~L