This last trip to New York City felt like a dream. I woke up on Friday morning and went to New York, and Tuesday I woke up in my home in LA, as if nothing had happened. As if it was a long dream.
Sometimes you only realize later that you had a great time somewhere. You think back and say "Now that I think about it, I really had a good time there and I hadn't appreciated it at the time". Other times though you have so much fun that you realize it as the events occur: If you can make this realization, that you are having a good time while you do so, this just means you will be very sad when you get back.
That has happened two more times in my life: First, in our 5th year undergrad weekly trip to Spain. All my good friends that I knew for 5 years now went there, and it was the last time we would be all together... We had a big company and so much fun. Second time was just 3 month ago at the Summer School in Cornell. That time it was good because I met so many new people in such a short time, we were going out and solving homework problems and visited the Niagara Falls and everything... I knew I would be sad when it ended.
Now it stroke me again. We had a group of 4 people that we are alike with similar tastes and aggressive to discover the city. The first 48 hours in the city were the most intense I ever had in my life: Too many things, too many people we met, too much input, too much laughter, in such a short time. The last 24 hours after were just a transition period where we all were burned out from the crazy weekend.
Apart from the picture perfect weather (this is the best time of the year to visit NYC), there was one key ingredient that led to the success of the trip: we had an almost perfect balance between pre-planned things to do and unexpected fortunate surprises. We were right on schedule with all the things that I was mentioning 5 posts before, but in between and during these activities so many other things happened, ranging from a hidden corner in Manhattan we just discovered to a random person giving us batteries to keep taking pictures.
This was also a trip of opposites: The title From Dali to Remi is the most striking of them all, starting 2 weeks ago when we were deciding to go there along the Mussaka dinner. Stayros had mentioned back them "Oh, the Museum of Modern Art is there, I think they have a nice collection of Dali paintings". I thought back then that Stayros was an art-lover and we would be spending most of our time in museums and stuff. On Saturday night at the trip though, we went to Remi, a traditional Greek type of club called Bouzoukia, and Stayros was making out with this Corfu girl that he just met while dancing. He got dizzy, and I had my first full 40% alcocholic drink in my life, a Martini. We left the place at 5am, all having had a great time, and quickly realizing that we wouldn't be going to visit Dali the next morning. At the end we didn't visit any of the other museums that we were planning at all.
Instead of Dali, we went to Remi, and we never regretted it.
