When I was a junior in high school, my family and I embarked on a classic American road-trip that traversed multiple states and led us all the way from one border to the other (Canada, eh?). I wasn’t sheltered, per se, growing up in Laredo. It’s a medium-sized town with a unique mix of cultures and we often took family trips around Texas and the nearby states. I had never traveled far north in the US, however, and had never seen many of the historic places and landmarks that I grew up learning about. The summer before senior year, we spent about a month on the road and I got to visit iconic American cities including Chicago, Boston, and New York City. NYC was the place I was most excited to visit. Countless books, tv shows, movies, and songs have been written about this city that in my mind made it seem like an other-worldly place. I daydreamed about life in a tiny New York apartment and I made plans with my high school best friend about being roomies in Brooklyn, but obviously I had no idea what life in a big city was like, much less one with 8.5 million people living in it. As you can probably imagine, by the time we actually reached the Big Apple, I was suddenly hit with a major case of culture shock. I think it was a mix of being out of my element in such a busy, crowded city and also being a little exhausted from the weeks of travel that we had already completed. I was so overwhelmed by the noises, the smells, the world around me seeming to move at double-speed; overall, New York didn’t live up to the unrealistic expectations of this fairytale-esque city that I had envisioned and that media romanticized for my teenage brain. We did the touristy NYC things, bought some souvenirs, I checked off New York from my list of must-visit cities, and I wrote it off as a place that I no longer needed to fantasize about.

Fast forward to last summer. My younger sister is recently graduated from high school and ready to embark on her college journey to...you guessed it. I always knew my sister was going to do big things and she always was the more spontaneous and crazy one of the two of us. So while I did have a slight over-protective freak-out when she told us she had accepted her offer to a college in Brooklyn, I wasn’t completely surprised. What did seem crazy to me, however, was that she accepted this offer to move to a place so far from home and with such a completely different culture than we were used to, without ever visiting the campus! So being the great big sister that I am, and not at all because I just wanted an excuse to travel, I offered to take her to visit Brooklyn and her college campus at least once before she officially moved in for the semester. So June 2018, my boyfriend, my sister, and I took a 4-day trip to New York. It was the second time visiting for all of us, but I thought it was especially important for my sister because last time we were there, she was only 12 or 13 years old.

Maybe it was the fact that we stayed in a cute Brooklyn brownstone, rather than in the middle of Manhattan, or maybe it was because I was more well-traveled and had 4 years of college and enriching cultural experiences, but I loved New York waaayyyy more the second time around. Also, don’t get me wrong, but traveling as a teenager with your parents isn’t the same as traveling as an adult. We got to cater the trip around what we wanted and centered it around the idea that my sister needed to get to know her soon-to-be home a little before moving in. This meant that the trip was less hectic, tourist-filled destinations, and a more realistic look at what life in this city would look like.

Now cut back to life now - my sister has just begun her sophomore year in New York and she is a full-fledged college student living in the City. My parents and I just took yet another NYC trip to set her up in her new apartment and I would not be upset if these small New York trips become a regular thing for us, or at least for the few years of college that she spends as a north-easterner. Not sure how she’ll survive those winters, but something tells me she’s going to be great at adapting.

To recap my most recent visits to New York City, and the hazy one in my teenage memory, here are some of my favorite NYC staples, places visited, and memories made: