A Map in Central Park

Context: This post is about the fourth day (and third day in the city) of my second New York City trip.

It seems like a disproportionate of my blog posts about New York talk about how we couldn't find one place or another.

Well, let me tell you. Finding addresses in that town can be a little difficult sometime. The problem is that while the street-and-avenue grid system is not so hard, the numbers on the actual buildings don't work the way they do in Utah. Here, the buildings between, say, 6th and 7th West are labeled as such: 602 West, 628 West, 656 West, etcetera, with the lower numbers being closer to 6th West and the higher numbers being closer to 7th West. But in New York City, if you were looking for 250 43rd Street, 250 wouldn't necessarily indicate that the building was between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. The building numbers are essentially useless.

...or are they? I actually researched the NYC numbering system for this blog post, just to be sure that I wasn't missing something. It turns out, according to multiple websites, that if you take a New York City building number, drop the last digit, divide the remainder by 2, and add or subtract a number from a special chart that some genius developed, you will get the number of the nearest cross street.

So, yeah, essentially useless.

On Friday morning, Little Sister, Baby Sister, and I set out for Chinatown. Well, actually, that wasn't the first thing we did. First we went to the Barnes and Noble on Union Square.

I think I know what you're thinking: You spent your vacation at Barnes and Noble, a place that you can visit not only at home but at literally almost any halfway decent town in the country?

I stand by my decision because a) books and b) you ain't never seen a Barnes and Noble like this before. There are rolling ladders attached to the shelves everywhere. Sadly, customers aren't supposed to climb on them, but I swear that one of these times that I'm in New York I'm going to get my sisters to distract the employees so that I can sail around on the ladder like Belle does in the bookshop in Beauty and the Beast.

After our Barnes and Noble break, we took the subway, got off on Canal Street, and began to roam the nearby area in our search for Chinatown.

Not even dropping digits and dividing by two would save us, because we weren't trying to get to any particular building. Where were we going? We didn't know. Just to some of the open-air shops for souvenirs and then to a restaurant for lunch. As neither "open-air shops" nor "restaurant for lunch" are viable locations for iPhones, we sort of wandered helplessly as we tried to figure out the best way to find this particular section of the city.

Finally, we found it. We almost got run over by a truck (okay, not exactly, but I tell you that this truck looked like it was going to hit us and my life flashed before my very eyes and it was okay but I've seen better movies), but we found it. We did a little shopping, and then we got dim sum: shrimp dumplings, sweet pork buns, potstickers, and crispy, juicy roasted duck! Delicious.

These are shrimp dumplings. My favorite dim sum dishes are these dumplings, sweet pork buns, and egg custard tarts. So if you ever have a hankering to bring me dim sum, you know what I like.

Then we faced the uncertainty of New York City navigation again so that we could go to Little Italy so that we could buy cannolis and gelato. Baby Sister tried a cannoli for the first time. I had my first cannoli in Italy, but if you can't have your first cannoli in Italy, have it in Little Italy in NYC.

Chocolate-covered cannoli!

But the very worst place to navigate in New York City is Central Park.

Some of you may remember the day we spent in Central Park last year. Little Sister and I really, really, really wanted to see the carousel. I don't know why, but we did. We spent an hour or more trying to find it. Spoiler alert: we did not find it. And, to paraphrase the words of Anne Shirley, it was one of the most tragical disappointments of my life.

I wrote this:

I'm going to make a quick observation, which is that Central Park needs some map kiosks with paper maps, like they have at Disneyland or the zoo. And if Central Park already has maps somewhere within its expansive borders, then there needs to be some other maps leading to those maps.

This time, things went considerably better.

First of all, apparently Central Park heard the words that my fingers typed (mixed metaphor, whatever, go with it), because they had a few banners with maps hanging around the park. And there were people who were selling expensive, unofficial paper maps at the entrance. But we didn't buy them because we felt like we could probably manage with our secret weapons: the smartphone!

Last May, Older Sister was afraid to leave her data on when we were roaming Central Park, so it was difficult to know if we were staying on course. This year, we all had smartphones, and we'd anticipated using a goodly portion of our data on the trip.

So this time, we left the smartphones on as we walked. Smartphone maps are easily confused, so it was still a little difficult, but within half an hour or so we found...

Ta-da!

...THE CAROUSEL!

They charged $3 a ride, which was not asking too much for a ride on a MAGICAL CAROUSEL OF JOY AND GLADNESS. I'm serious. It was wonderful. Don't ask me why. It just was.

We also hit the Chess & Checkers House and Strawberry Fields. Then, as we were heading towards the Alice in Wonderland statue, something wonderful happened.

A Central Park Conservancy ranger stopped us. 

"Do you want a map?" he asked.

We said no thanks.

"It's free."

We changed our minds.

He asked us where we were going. He drew a route for us on a paper map and then gave the map into our keeping.

Central Park!!! Good job. You have surpassed all of my wildest map dreams.

At the Alice in Wonderland statue we met up with Older Sister. Then, alas, it started to rain.

To get out of the rain, we hastened to The Plaza. Little Sister and I, when planning the trip, had decided it would be fun to take Baby Sister to eat there...in the food court below the hotel. So it sounds a lot fancier than it was. It was still good, though. I had a delicious smoked salmon-cream cheese-caper crepe and a classic Nutella crepe for dessert. (Yes, I had three desserts that day! We had multiple desserts every day, actually, but you can't blame us. New York City is the Land of Many Desserts.)

After the rain, we wondered the streets of the city. We went into several fancy stores, such as Tiffany's. The employees there were very nice and called us "ladies." At Tiffany's, we were told we could take pictures of whatever we wanted...since I guess it was obvious that we weren't there to shop.

Finally, it was time for us to go to School of Rock.

The ladders at Barnes and Noble were a high point of the day.

So was dim sum, cannolis, and gelato.

So was the carousel.

But School of Rock was the best.

I have to say, I had my doubts going into it. First of all, it's Andrew Lloyd Webber. My perception is that Andrew Lloyd Webber is Broadway's M. Night Shyamalan. Everyone used to love everything he did, but then he made something so terrible (coughTheLastAirbendercoughLoveNeverDiescough) that now he's kind of a joke. Second of all, after seeing Finding Neverland, I was worried that this musical would have the same problem. I was worried it would lose what was great about the movie while simultaneously not bringing anything new to the table. Still, the Tony performance of "You're in the Band" was good; Alex Brightman looked like he was matching Jack Black's energy, so maybe there was hope.

So on Friday night we got to the Winter Garden Theatre, took our seats, opened our programs, and looked at the list of replacements.

And Alex Brightman was not there.

His understudy was playing that night.

Another of life's tragical disappointments!

Also, Luca Padovan, who played Les in Newsies, has a leading role in School of Rock, and I was looking forward to seeing him because I've only heard good things about him. But his understudy was playing that night, too.

So it was with considerable reluctance that we waited for the show to begin.

Then the lights dimmed, and they played a recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I know it was Andrew Lloyd Webber, because he said, "This is Andrew Lloyd Webber," in his prissy accent. He then informed us that people always asked whether the kids were, in fact, really playing their instruments live. The answer to that question was yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber said.

Thanks, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Thanks for sharing.

Then the show began. And...oh my goodness...it was awesome. It hit all the right notes. It kept almost every line from the movie, verbatim, which you'd think would be boring but totally wasn't. The kid actors? So good! And the understudy, Will Klum? A-freaking-mazing! I forgot he was the understudy!

During the Battle of the Bands, we, the audience, became the Battle of the Bands audience, so suddenly we were basically at a rock concert and an important part of the show. That was fun, but awkward, because we were chanting the "School of Rock! School of Rock!" before Dewey and company were supposed to hear the audience calling them for an encore. They basically had to wait for us to stop chanting so that they could deliver their lines.

All around, a perfect adaptation and a super fun musical. We loved it so much that we stage doored afterward.

Stage dooring, for you non-theatre people, is when you wait by theatre's exit for the cast members to come out. We'd already been planning to stage door, but if we hadn't loved the show so much we probably would have just gone back to the dorm. It was still raining hard. Like, parts of the sidewalk were actually flooded with a few inches of water. In spite of that, Little Sister and I shoved my crumpled, wet playbill into the actors' faces so that they could sign it with silver marker. I later posted some of the signatures on Instagram and tagged the actors. Other actors in the show liked the photo, and the official School of Rock Instagram actually commented on it! *swoons*

On the way home, we grabbed a bite (Wendy's for my sisters, Halal for me) and headed home, full of excitement and hopped up on a show well done. It was a long time before I got to bed.