New York, the City that Never Sleeps- Day #1

Different from those who eager to explore the wilderness in Africa, taste an exotic cuisine in Far East or merely uncover the mysterious veil of Middle East, being as a child growing up and surrounded by Disney cartoon characters, Marvel comics and Hollywood blockbusters, America has always been the top of the top priority on my traveling list.

I finally got the chance to visit my dreamland in 2012 by joining a short-term intensive TOEFL training program in a language center in Long Island, NY. When you ask people their impression or imagination about New York, it is hard to reach out a general agreement on the descriptions of the city. But if you asked me about my impression of New York City or Manhattan, I will definitely name it: "the city that never sleeps".

Here is the photo I taken while visiting the tallest and one of the representative skyscrapers located in Midtown Manhattan, the Empire State Building. After a week of intensive and exhausting English training courses, I arrived at the Penn Station in the city center of New York which is right next to the home of New York Knicks, the Maddison Square Garden. My friend and I asked for a touring book about Manhattan from the hotel's reception desk. The book recommended several routes for visitors with different length of traveling time. As only planned to stay for two days in Manhattan, my friend and I bought the bounded tickets called City Pass which include the entrance tickets of 4 museums and the fast pass ticket for Empire State building. 

My friend and I are both fascinated about several modern artists such as Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt, and we've also heard about the big name of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for long so our first stop in New York then started from here.

Museum of Modern Art is also located in Midtown Manhattan. The collections of the museum didn't let us down, actually it is AWESOME!!! (whistling~) It contains artworks from Vincent van Gogh to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and many outstanding surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali.

Pablo Picasso Girl Before a Mirror

Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Vincent van Gogh The Starry Night

Claude Monet Les Nymphéas

 Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso are among the most popular artists in the museum for they have their own proponents and for their unique painting skills. Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are not strange for me since I learned the history of western art when I was in elementary school. Les Nymphéas by Claude Monet is a bit different from my impression on the textbook. The color is milder, and I could even find the aging traces when I looked closely enough.  

Henri Matisse La Danse

Salvador Dali The Persistence of the Memory

Amedeo Clement Modigliani Madame Zborowska on a Sofa 

Followed after those I acquainted with, are the artists who have once hosted exhibitions in Taiwan. La Danse by Henri Matisse, we see five naked women dancing on the grass without clear facial expression. This way of presenting the main figure in the drawing is the typical reflection of impressionism spirit: the feature of an artwork has transformed from traditional sophisticated facial portrait to blurred one.

Salvador Dali and Modigliani have both displayed their artworks a year before in Taiwan. Although I didn't visit personally to Modigliani's exhibition, through news media's vast promotion, several of his representative paintings have left impression in my mind.

After visiting the Museum of Modern Art, my friend and I can't wait for the super duper famous Manhattan night view on Empire State Building. Since we've anticipated how crowded it will be,  we arrived at around 6:30 pm dinner time. The fast pass ticket did safe us almost half of the waiting time. We take the elevator straight up to the 86th floor and THAT IS IT!!!!!!!!!!

  

Can't be more BEAUTIFUL and AMAZING right?!!!!!!!!! I follow the instruction of the voice guide and listen to the detailed introduction of this enchanting Big Apple and the distinct stories of each skyscrapers that support not only the American economy and also symbol the "American Dream"for hundreds of years.

It seems like a century has passed by when I finally awaked from the legend of New York by the sudden pause of the end of the voice guidance. It is also the very first time I realized why New York has always been called the City that Never Sleeps.

Traveller and Tourist

After watching one of the must see movie Eat, Pray, Love, and experienced the bitter sweet with Elizabeth through her journey from the West to the East, one thing just bumped into my mind that "Do we live by traveling OR do we travel by living?" Most of us live an ordinary lives and travel during holidays or vacations for sure. We work hard for next trip out of the office and bustling life. We highly depend on traveling to slow down our paces, to give the so-called "routine" life a stimulation but most importantly, to give yourself an incentive to look for, to move on, and to rescue the capability of  "hope" that you lost for long.

 So it comes to the next argument about "traveller and tourist".Who can be seen as a traveller and what attitude makes you a tourist? To me, the definition is clear when you answer to the first question at the very beginning of the article. That is, a traveller travels by living; a tourist lives by traveling. But why is it? Certainly, we knew the motto "life is a journey" since we first learned the word "life". As time passed by, we no longer taking the two as the same, we segment them in different categories, one for supporting our daily necessities and the other for us to escape or to free our soul. We are getting easily to overlook the simple happiness in our life. We believe that another trip will help us to find back who we really are.

I believe that in the journey of life, one should be a traveller not a tourist. To live in this moment and only by doing so can you actually see the subtle happiness appears in your daily life. Meanwhile, you will reflect yourself intensively and that you will hardly to forget what you really want and who you eager to be. You will cherish everything in your life because you know that there is always a lesson for you to learn. In this case, you are traveling for real in any time and at any place. You are well-prepared to feel, to experience, and to be moved in every single moment in your life, and that's the only way to make your journey a very unique one.