terminal situation at terminal five.

Sorry for the lack of updates! I left California Thursday night for New York. It was my first time stepping foot in New York since I moved away. And my first time in the big city. I was supposed to be back two days ago, but unfortunately had some trouble catching flights at the airport. I'm finally back!

With only two weeks left to decide my college, I went to New York to visit schools to make the decision making easier. Unfortunately, I'm not any closer to making a decision now than before. I literally only had enough time there to go look at the schools and then fly back, so I didn't get to be very touristy or go shopping at all. The only thing I bought was one of those touristy I heart NY tees at the airport.

I didn't get very many pictures at all. Mostly because it took too much effort to take out my camera. But also because I felt kind of uncomfortable taking pictures when no one else was. Here's me being touristy in front of the George Washington Statue at Union Square, while I was on my way to check out the Parsons dorms.
It was a lot less cold that I had expected, so I overdressed a bit. I looked pretty terrible the whole weekend, but you know. I prefer being unfashionably warm than stylishly cold.

I took the tour at Fashion Institute of Technology first, and then went on to Parsons. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I had a pretty good first impression of FIT. My dad didn't want us to be out at night, so we headed to the hotel in Brooklyn. Hotels are dead expensive in New York City. It cost $250 for a three star hotel; $100 more than in California. Here's the view from my room. It was all like auto parts and centers outside. Kinda felt like downtown Los Angeles.

On Saturday, I spent the day at Pratt Institute's accepted student day. Pratt was my first choice school when I first decided that I wanted to go to art school. But as I started to apply to more schools, I forgot why I wanted to go so badly. When I took the tour of the campus, I suddenly remembered why. Pratt has such a gorgeous campus. And the buildings oh my god.
I went to UCLA last week for their accepted student day for the art department, and their campus is extremely pretty too. I took pictures on my Minolta SLR and tried to scan them, but the scanner is too old to use on my Windows 7, so I can't scan it. But my point is, as pretty as UCLA is, I like Pratt's campus better. And that's saying something.

I will need to decide what school I'm going to by next week, so I'm trying to make it easier by creating a pro and con chart for each of the school and tallying up points.

JFK airport is probably the biggest and most beautiful airport I've seen in my life. Minus Taipei International airport, maybe. Though I'm probably just being biased. But the best national airport, hands down. It's so incredibly huge and spacious.

On Saturday evening, I was supposed to fly back home, but a storm was brewing and my plane, which was flying in from Dominican Republic, couldn't make a landing and flew to Boston instead. After that, my dad confirmed a different flight to a more far away airport. We were able to board that one, but I sat in the airplane for over an hour, when the intercom went on and told us that the captain could not fly because of a certain 16 hour rule. There was a lot of swearing reactions going on. We were kicked off and the second flight was canceled.
I lived at the airport for the rest of the night, unable to get a flight. All the flights on Sunday were booked, and the earliest flight was Monday night, to an airport that I've never been to in California. We booked that one, and was put on standby for some of the full flights.

I wanted to go to Manhattan to check out Nintendo World, but because we were on standby for so many flights, we had to stay at the airport. I spent all of Sunday at the airport until finally catching a standby flight on the third try. Third time's the charm.

Goshdang, I love California. I love California. But I am a hundred percent sure that I want to move to New York for college. I'll need some getting used to.

Love, Kai