So this is New York. My only experience here was 5 days out of a ritzy hotel next to Grand Central, and I experienced very little of the actual city. My serious, academic motive for being out here is to find out about the schools and the cities to get a feel for whether I could go to school for 3 years here. Not exactly helpful, then, that I arrive to a small town on Long Island and get picked up by Ruthie and Renee, who are residents of SmallTown, USA. Seriously, lots of LI looks exactly like you think a small town in the northeast should look after seeing plenty of cheesy romantic comedies. Going by The Car Scale™, this is one of the richest cities I've ever seen. This place ***loves*** their German cars. It's an extension of the Keeping Up With The Joneses game they play here - adjacent driveways will have identically-equipped A8s or 750s with different colors. The roads are filled with all sorts of BMWs, Mercs and Porsches to the point of saturation. After a stop for some NY-style pizza (I still find it lacking flavor), we wind up at the house where I'm staying, and it's an interesting experience. The two girls live with their father, who's deaf, and a grandmother who, bless her heart, is 92. When they asked me the usual questions like where I'm from, how I knew Ruthie, etc., Ruthie had to play translator for virtually all my conversations. Later that night, Ruthie and I hopped on a train for the hour-long ride into Manhattan. Upon arrival, we took a handful of subways until we wound up in the museum district, where I found my cousin Kelly waiting outside the Guggenheim. All of us were bound for the party going on inside the museum. It was one of the cooler parties I'd seen. It was in celebration of an exhibit of a mid-20th-century sculptor, so all of that stuff was visible alongside a bar and the swingin' sounds of DJ Spooky, who knew how to rock an art party. It was a fine time, but Ruthie fell sick so we took off early.