In Chicago my kids attended a (very) Jewish day school. This resulted in them barely going to school during September due to all the Jewish holidays.
In Aspen my kids got oct 26-27 off for fall break, Nov 1-3 off for parent teacher conferences and Nov 20-24 off for Thanksgiving. Normally this is where I would have a snide comment about the more you pay the less you go but they attend a public school and property taxes in Aspen are very low, so uh well........... I got to spend some quality time with the kids.
With the week off for Thanksgiving we made our every 4 year visit to see my wife's family. But before we get to the main event in Philadelphia we visited NYC for 2 1/2 days with the kids. Trying to show NYC to your 11 & 14 year old in a couple of days is impossible. I will attempt to cover it in a Dave Letterman type top 10 list of the 'best' things about NYC.
10. NYC--it pushes your immune system to be the best it can be (or to quote my daughter I can't breath there are too many germs.
9. Laguardia airport --just like you remembered it (ditto Penn station)
8. Cupcakes and Pizza everywhere
7. Home of more restaurants than Aspen has people
6. World Trade Center memorial ---powerful and really well done
5. Same metrocard, same 2 & 3 trains as 1993--how comforting
4. Same nightly noises ---trucks rolling over steel plates, barking dogs, construction, sirens and alarms
3. Garbage in bags on streets --if the Aspen bears ever hear about NYC they are so outta here
2. Diversity---and holy shit folks there are getting along
1. Everything you could want (except space) jammed into 22 square miles
FYI Manhattan is 22 square miles with a population of around 1.7m people. Pitkin county is 973 square miles with 18k people. Running the numbers for you that makes Manhattan 4,177 times more dense than the Aspen area. Or to put that another way all of Pitkin county's population fits into 1/4 of a mile of Manhattan and you could just about fit all of Aspen's population into one large Manhattan highrise.
No comments:
Post a Comment