Anniversary in NYC

Five years we've been  married now!?! How the time flies (when you're having fun, I guess)! We decided to spend the weekend as far away from the beach as possible (since everyone else heads there for the holiday weekend, I guess that is the downside to getting married so close to the 4th), and where better to find lots of free things to see than NYC! Our one splurge was to the Natural History Museum, where we saw real-live dinosaur bones. We just assumed that they were replicas until we were told that 80% of the bones are the real deal. Wow! They don't fool around. 


We also ate lunch in Central Park and then walked around the neighborhood, cooled off at a Starbucks and walked to Harold Square, I think, down Broadway. We took the subway to our hotel in Chinatown, with it's adorable teeny-weenie Ikea-like room. The original place we were going to eat had closed, and we stumbled upon this great restaurant where we had lamb and veggies for a ridiculous price. Next door we heard they had some "boutze," something we ate and loved in Chengdu, China, and we ate some even though we were stuffed from the other delicious place. Then we wandered around Little Italy and had some gelato. Yum! Look you can see the Empire State building in my picture!


The next day, though it was super hot, we went up to Times Square to see it in the daytime. We cooled off in Bryant Park before wandering around in a Japanese book store before calling it a day. Who would have thought that two hicks from the Midwest would be celebrating five years later in NYC!

Can you hear me now? Good!

This past week was vacation week for us! On Tuesday we rode the train into NYC to go see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, which took us nearly all day to see! We had no idea that when we got to Battery Park to get the tickets, there would be lines, lines, and more lines waiting for us: lines to get onto the ferry (and to go through a security check point) lines to get into the museum and pedestal of Lady Liberty, lines to get back on the ferry to get the Ellis Island...

But I think over all it was worth it. It was exciting to be in NYC for the very first time and it was cool to see Lady Liberty up close and personal (she's hollow on the inside). The exhibits at Ellis Island were very interesting, since some of our relatives might have passed through there. We even saw a brochure advertising Minnesota from that period! How lost and lonely people must have felt in the great hall, especially when they didn't speak the language.

Here we learned something interesting - only steerage passengers where subjected to the health check. But if you had the money to upgrade to second class, you wouldn't even have to mess with Ellis Island. It was also interesting to see that at the Statue of Liberty, if you had purchased the Crown Tickets (to go all the way up, which were rare and pricey) you got to skip the rest of the line waiting to go through security at the statue - you got to go right to the head of the line. The steerage class is very much alive in many ways.

We were pretty beat by the end of the day, so we decided to skip our other plans to see the 9/11 memorial and Times Square. There is plenty of opportunities to go back, since it is so close! One more thing about NYC - the NJ transit commuter trains were lovely, but the subway is hot and smelly and crowded. We had a much more pleasant experience riding public transit while in Hong Kong. And Penn Station is rather confusing for a couple of first timers (but we didn't get lost).

In other news, last week I had an initial interview with a call committee, and Saturday evening I preached my "trial sermon" at a church nearby, which is the home church of a good friend of ours. As it turns out, I had been there before, in college, when a bunch of us decided to spend a week in NJ. Only God knew then that I would be living here someday!