Image by S Wilson

I’m a big city girl. That’s a well known fact. I love to visit the wilderness and see small towns on the roadside that may only see a handful of travelers every month, but my home needs to be in a big city. In fact, New York City would be perfect for me, but right now life seems to have me tied to the west coast. However, when the opportunity to visit New York arose a few years ago I hopped to it and spent 10 fantastic days exploring the city that I’ve dreamed about since I was a child.

Even with ten days in the city, nine of them in Manhattan, I left wishing I had more time to explore. I just scratched the surface of Manhattan and barely touched the outer Burroughs and bits of Long Island. Some of the many things I did there included seeing Rent on Broadway, visiting the Life Cafe and Avenue A, walking through Central Park, seeing everything at The Rock (including the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree since it was December), and eating everything you have to eat when you visit New York like pizza, hot dogs, bagels, and so so much more. But I actually had to cut things from the itinerary in order to get back home in time. My desire to see the entire city was so great I nearly killed my travel partner. When we returned home to California, he was exhausted and sick with the flu while I was already starting to plan our next trip.

For any American that wants to someday see the big cities of the world, New York is a great place to start. There isn’t a language barrier and you don’t have to get used to new currency or laws. As I traveled through Paris and Rome in the summer of 2008, I was very grateful to already know how to navigate a subway system, read a map, and just generally find my way around a large city beforehand. I’m sure this knowledge will be useful as I visit Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore as well (by the time this is published, I will be in the middle of the trip, so check out my travel blog to see how I’m managing!).

Image by S Wilson

New York will always hold a special place in my heart no matter where I go in the world. It seems like most of my favorite movies, TV shows, and books either take place in New York or visit there from time to time. I even got to see a live taping of The Colbert Report during my visit. I requested tickets through their website months in advance, but it was only a couple of weeks before my trip that I got confirmation that I got tickets. I showed up hours before we were allowed in, but there were already two groups of people in front of us.

For the next few hours a camaraderie grew among those of us in the front of the line and people began to line up behind us. We watched as The Colbert Report crew finished taking pictures in front of the studio for a segment that would air that night and speculated about what the sketch could possibly be about. When that excitement died down we socialized with those around us in line again until we finally got let into the studio.

We got seats in the front row as they let us in based on the order we arrived, so Colbert himself was mere feet away from me and I was literally bouncing up and down in the seat with excitement. Colbert is just… weird. Bizarre, actually. His satirical take on the Conservative Right can offend many, but the strangeness of each and every segment just jives with me for some reason. I’d loved him since his very first episode and there he was behind his huge C-shaped desk just a few feet in front of me.

When the taping of the show let out I was still reeling from the adrenaline rush. We stumbled into some nearby Chinese restaurant and scarfed down some food before hopping back on the LIRR back to Josh’s grandparents house in South Hampstead. When we got home it was just about time for The Colbert Report to air on TV. We all watched it, of course. Though many of the jokes were lost on his grandparents, the few brief shots of us in the audience were well worth staying up late for.

I will go back to New York someday. It’s only a matter of when.