Surrounded by flashy lights of hundreds of illuminated billboards and even flashier tourists in “I *heart* New York” shirts, I stood in Times Square with my fellow band members, gawking at the gleaming metropolis before us like a child in front of a toy store. We were there. In New York City–a city vaster and more diverse than a bunch of students from Canyon, Texas could ever imagine. And we had only just arrived.

Band members traveled to New York City over the spring break to compete in a concert band competition sponsored by the Performance Arts Consultants and to explore a few of the many sites the city had to offer. Not only did the band place first in their competition, with a score of 95 out of 100, they also got a taste of the Big Apple.

Day One

We arrived at the La Guardia Airport after traveling overnight on charter buses to the Dallas airport, then flying on a plane to New York. Our first destination? Times Square, of course! The first clash with so many people and so many places was overwhelming, and there was much confusion on what to do or see first. Many of us followed the band directors to Junior’s, which offered what they claimed to be the best cheesecake in all of New York City. After a slice of their original New York style cheesecake, I had to agree. The rest of the day was spent shopping and site seeing in Times Square, which was a central location for tourists like us, but lacked the real New York feel many of us wanted. That problem was solved on…

Day Two

After competing in the contest, we bused into Chinatown and Little Italy; centers for racial diversity, culture, and, that’s right, price haggling. Bombarded by great deals on ‘genuine Rolex watches’, t-shirts, even those little Chinese cats that wave at you, we purchased and ate our way through the streets, stopping only for New York taxi cabs. We later climbed back on the bus with our merchandise and vendor food to visit Macy’s, the largest store in the world. Nine floors of original wooden escalators and more commodities than a Wal-Mart on steroids later, we emerged from the retailer exhausted and hungry. Dinner that night took place at Medieval Times. It proved to be not only a successful night for us, but also for our ‘knight’ and he reigned as champion of the show.

Day Three

We woke early in the morning to avoid bad traffic and left to meet our bus tour guide of New York City. We saw famous sites of New York, such as Strawberry Fields, Central Park, the Merck bull and The 9-11 Memorial preview. The tour took most of the day, and I was amazed at how many people could coexist on such a small area of land. After the tour, we stopped on Broadway for my favorite part of the entire trip: “Wicked.” The musical, a twist on the story “The Wizard of Oz,” was beautifully performed and was well worth the expensive tickets we’d purchased months in advance to attend.

Day Four

We traveled to the Ellis Island Immigration Center via ferry on a very cold and rainy morning. The view and the occupancy of the ferry almost mandated that most of the teenagers sit on the top, exposed floor, and huddle together as immigrants might have as we took shaky pictures of the Statue of Liberty in the distance. On Ellis Island, we toured where millions of people first touched American soil, and learned about strangers and ancestors alike who made the journey to the New World. We then took another cold journey on the ferry to Liberty Island, home of the Statue of Liberty. More photos were taken of that blue-green lady than I think anything else on the trip. With some complaint from the guards, our group got to walk 192 stairs to Lady Liberty’s observation deck, with the assurance that the adults accompanying us would prevent us from tearing down the whole monument on a whim. We caught one of the last ferries back to the main city, at which point we traveled to our next location, Rockefeller Plaza. We wandered down Fifth Avenue, surrounded by New York’s wealth, until we were scheduled to ride to the top of the Rockefeller Building, one of the tallest buildings in the city. The skyline at night glowed for as far as the eye could see, and we could finally see the true enormity of the city. This ended our last night in New York.

Day Five

Our last day in New York, we did the least, yet for the first time, we were not rushed to get from one place to the next. We spent more time in Central Park, and I had an encounter with a bona fide New York crazy, who went by the name of Coyote Butterfly and “performed” by balancing along the edges of benches. Needless to say, I wasn’t very tempted to leave change in his butterfly-adorned top hat. We then escaped the natural world for the artistic one, and spent a few hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was one of my favorite parts of the trip. We did not have enough time to explore all of the exhibits, but most of the ones we did look through had aspects everyone could appreciate. If not, the cheap shopping outside was enough to tide anyone over for a few hours.

We said farewell to New York, and departed for the La Guardia airport again. With some hassle about carry-on snow globes (which are NOT a good idea, by the way), and other various souvenirs, we, the now exhausted tourists, boarded our flight back to Texas, back to home. We returned to the place where there are more stars in the sky at night than city lights on the skyline, where even a turtle can cross the street in relative safety, and where all of the chaos and life of New York faded into the peace and quiet of the rest of spring break.