New York Times

New York is an adult Disneyland. No, not that kind of adult! I mean, it's a living amusement park for human beings. You could walk for miles and miles, exploring neighborhoods, eating different foods, watching different people, and never get bored! Here's a play by play of our trip. We got off the plane and decided to take the bus and the subway instead of a cab. I was amazed at the diversity! Even California didn't have the kind of diversity that I saw in New York. In this picture you see all kinds of different people sitting towards the back of the bus. I wanted to take a picture of the front of the bus but the Klingons, Wookies, and Nazgûl told me that they didn't want their pictures taken. I shouldn't have brought these shoes. These shoes are cool but they hurt my feet. There was so much walking! I should have brought my skateboard instead. Disneyland has Mickey Mouse. New York has the Naked Cowboy. Part of me regards him as a hero. The other part of me is taking a hot shower and scrubbing vigorously with soap. We went to Rockefeller Center which, along with every other building in New York, has a lot of offices. It also has a shrine to the Office. I was disappointed by how small it was. That's what she said. We tried to get tickets to see Wicked. We couldn't afford the face value tickets so we tried to get the lottery tickets instead. It was so exciting! You would put your name down and they put it in a cylinder and would roll it around and then pull some names out. It was exciting because you knew that you didn't have a good chance of winning. But this was true for everyone there. So it was especially exciting to see people get super pumped when they won. This was one of my favorite things about our trip. We did this three times! And we didn't win any of those times. BUT IT WAS SO EXCITING! Anne and Jason were such a blessing to us. We got to stay at their apartment and they put up with us even though they were super busy. I got to teach Anne how to lose in chess. I told her if she ever got better, I would never play with her again. I hope the motivational talk worked. Jason loves to eat. It's a good thing I do too. I also played a lot of Wii that week. I could've probably played Wii all week. But my wife wasn't going to let me do that. We saw these amazing cupcakes. I think Mike could make better cupcakes. But I'm not sure. I guess he'll just have to make me some so I can see if they're better than these cupcakes. But seriously, these cupcakes were A May Zing. One of the wife's friends is the layout guru for Seventeen. I asked if I could get my headshot on the cover of Seventeen. She told me to send her my stuff. I hope to get some glamour shots done soon. Chinatown was fun. We ate some ice cream at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. Totally worth it. We were going to eat some dumplings but because my wife makes awesome dumplings I was afraid that I was going to be disappointed. We ate Malaysian food instead (which was delicious!). Afterward, we saw this sign. Apparently people have been leaving dumplings everywhere. Probably because they aren't as good as my wife's dumplings. I'm glad we didn't eat dumplings. We ended our trip at the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was a pretty awesome piece of architecture. Walking across it was really fun. Coming back from New York made me realize that I love living in cities. On the flip side, though, it would be difficult to raise a family there. If you're interested you can see more pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/MisterAvery/NewYork