New York City, that is. I love the city, and miss it like crazy, while at the same time acknowledging that there is no realistic way for us to ever live there. For the kids, this was the first full visit to NYC (having only taken Bo and Sula into the city for a day for a friend’s wedding brunch), the occasion being my third cousin’s bat mitzvah. Adam took the day off of work on Friday so that we could an extra afternoon and evening exploring the city. We stayed in a really nice two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side for less than we would have spent on a hotel, thanks to the brilliant AirBnB website.
On Friday afternoon, after dropping our stuff off at the apartment, we headed straight to Central Park and up Belvedere Castle to get a good view of the park and city. The kids absolutely loved the park, Bo in particular. After a quick dinner for the kids at a little pizza place, we took the kids for a ride on the Roosevelt Island Tram. It’s a quick (five minutes or so) ride across the East River from 59th Street to Roosevelt Island. But the views are really cool (see the photo) and it’s cheap- just the cost of a roundtrip subway ride. Adam and I capped the night with a takeout meal from the NYC restaurant we miss most desperately after the kids went to bed.
The next day, we took the subway to Battery Park and caught the Staten Island Ferry. Did you know the ferry is free?? We had considered taking the Liberty and Ellis Island ferry, but it cost a lot and you have to go through security. You can get a decent view of the Statue of Liberty (aka the Statue of Liverty, as some of the small people in our family call it) from the Staten Island Ferry, and you can’t beat a free boat ride! The kids loved it.
Saturday afternoon, we went to my cousin’s bat mitzvah. I haven’t seen this particular cousin since she was a baby, and for the non-Jews reading this, a child becomes a bat mitzvah when she is twelve or thirteen. So it’s been awhile. The ceremony was lovely and full of meaning, with my cousin’s speech about her Torah portion touching upon her identity as an African-American Jew. It was by far the most racially diverse crowd I’ve ever seen at a Jewish event of any kind; one of the reasons we haven’t been as involved with a shul as I’d like is because I hesitate to bring our family into a community where our children are the only people of color, and so it was nice to be able to attend a service as a family in such a comfortable setting. This branch of my family is also suprisingly diverse, through interracial marriage and domestic and international adoption, and it was cool for our kids to be surrounded by family that looked like them. We kept the kids up way past their bedtimes to enjoy the bat mitzvah party and didn’t get home from New York until after midnight, but the trip was a huge success. The kids haven’t stopped talking about it since…
