New York, New York!

Hello, friend!

I just got back yesterday from the most wonderful trip to New York. Almost everyone we met was so kind, it was so strange(New Yorkers are known for having quite the attitudes)! In December, I had the  idea one night to go to New York to watch Anastasia on Broadway with my mom and it turned into a three night trip. Luckily, we found extremely cheap plane tickets on United Airlines, and I'm 100% sure that it was God that kept us safe and made this trip flow smoothly. I'm also grateful to God and my family for the opportunity that I had to even go, I know that for some it can be a luxury to travel at all.

"Welcome to New York"

I planned our itinerary before we left and made a long list of everything that we wanted to watch and eat, and we got right into our schedule when we landed. The first night we had dinner at Ellen's Stardust Diner. This diner is unlike any other because the wait staff are all Broadway star wannabes (some have even come back from Broadway and are serving), and they sing while they serve and in between! 

We walked around Times Square and took pictures, and also visited the Line Friends Store, which was super cute. I purchased a little roll of tape that had bunnies printed on it for my bullet journal. 

At the Line Friends Store!

We decided to head back to the hotel early because we were tired from traveling all day and wanted to get a bright and early start the next morning.

the view from our hotel! yay!

After quickly getting ready, we went to lower Manhattan and tried matcha tea at this cute pink-themed store called Cha Cha Matcha. If you like matcha, you'll love it! It tasted kind of like fruity pebbles.

Literally after getting drinks, we walked to a cute place called The Butcher's Daughter and had an açaí bowl as a little before-lunch snack. This place is decorated very well, and the bowl was so yummy! 

After shopping in SoHo, we walked to the Museum of Chinese in America. This museum was amazing. I didn't know that much about the history of Chinese people in America since it's not taught as well in schools, but I learned a lot. We learned about the struggles that Chinese people went through, and about the major breakthroughs that they had as significant events occurred in America.

Did you know that originally Chinatowns were made to keep Chinese people in there, and away from other people? I thought that that was so interesting.

A chair that a Chinese immigrant would sit on to answer questions about America or else they were deported.

There was a special exhibit about the Golden Venture, which was a cargo ship that smuggled illegal Chinese people into New York. Some of the illegal immigrants who went to jail made paper folded crafts, otherwise known as zhézhī  (摺紙) as thank you gifts for the people who were trying to help them attain freedom. 

We then hopped on the subway to go back up to Times Square. We ate pizza and then went to see Anastasia! It just so happened that we were seeing the show on my Spirthday(spiritual birthday), which was so cool. I felt like it was quite the gift from God! After the show, we waited outside the stage doors and got a picture with Christie Altomare, the girl who starred as Anastasia.

By then it was late, so we walked to Shake Shack across the street and got shakes and fries for a snack. 

The next day, we went to the New York Public Library. We had been to New York before, but we had never gone inside the library, gone to the Museum of Modern Art, or seen the Flat Iron Building, so those places were the goal for this day. 

My mom and I first went to Good Morning America at 7 am and were on tv!! Woo hoo!! 

When we got back, I saw myself on TV!

It's so flat!

We also went to the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum is free on Friday nights, which was a bonus! My feet were hurting from walking like 11 miles, so we didn't spend too much time there, but saw the things we really wanted to see: Monet and Van Gogh. 

We took the Ferry to Staten Island that night and visited our friends, the Schefflers, in Staten Island. We got lunch with them and then headed back to the Midwest!

This trip to New York was jam-packed, and so much fun. We had pretty decent weather, too. It warmed up on Friday and Saturday for us, and anything above zero is warm! I start classes in two days, and am feeling refreshed and motivated to take on second semester. 

Shoutout to my mom for coming on this trip with me and for making it so much fun. <3 

I hope that  you all have a fantastic week!

Joy :) 

Happy October 1st!

Hello, friend!

HAPPY FIRST DAY OF OCTOBER!! Today I went apple and pumpkin picking with some friends from church, crossing off two things from my fall bucket list! I will be making pies with the apples that I picked probably this Thursday, so you can expect another blog post soon about that.

It was a perfect day today to go apple picking, the sun was out, and there were still many apples left for us to pick! It was also my very first time apple picking, and I definitely enjoyed it. Apples are more rewarding to pick because you get much more fruit than when you pick cherries or raspberries, which takes hours for less fruit. We went to this place called, "Eplegaarden," which is a super cute Norwegian-themed apple garden. My mom was really excited about the Norwegian part, too.

Me, Tatum, and Abby! <3

We found this cute apple heart thing and decided to sit in it for cute pics. Also, we kept on finding the TINIEST little apples, and they were actually still very delish!

I found the most perfect pumpkin which I took home, and it is now sitting on the table as a little centerpiece! I just discovered that pumpkin stems are SO spiky, and therefore not fun to pick up by the stem. It was worth it though, to bring our pumpkins home! We also picked literally SO many apples, I am going to have to eat more than just, "an apple a day," before they go bad! I am looking forward to continuing my fall bucket list, and will be updating you guys as I continue to cross things off of it.

Right now, I'm very busy with school so I haven't had much time to write blog posts. I have so many projects that I'm doing, and I'm just praying that I can get them done and still get to bed at a reasonable time each night! This was such a fun way to kick off October though, and I'm so excited for many more fun events to come.

Have a great week!

Joy :)

My First Week of College

Hello, friend!

School is back in full force and I've had half a week of classes and a lot of fun so far at UW-Madison. Luckily, I've made it early to all of my classes so I've gotten good seats and made some new friends. It's so easy to just meet the person next to you, and it's interesting seeing how everyone really is quite friendly the first year of college.

One of the things that I especially love about our campus is that we are right by two spectacular lakes. It's so amazing how you can just stop and set up a hammock right next to the water and enjoy the view. My friend Allie and I just did that a couple of days ago, and I just ordered a compact hammock to bring with me to campus as well. It's coming tomorrow(thx too Amazon student prime), and I hope to get a lot of use out of it before it gets too cold. Maybe I'll do homework in it. I've probably spent a good five or six hours doing homework so far, which isn't that bad, considering that I have four classes and one guitar class.

love Wisco

College is so strange because you really have a different schedule from all of your friends. So even if you do have free time, you might not have time to get with the people you want to get with because they might be in classes. Also, since I'm commuting every day to school, it's a tad bit more difficult to hang out with people later because I don't want to be on the bus super late. Shoutout to my parents, though, who help drive me places because paying for parking is expensive!! Speaking of modes of transportation, at UW-Madison's campus there are bikes everywhere that are put there by the brand, "BCycle." Funny story- I used a bike ONCE for like, an hour, and was charged $54 dollars for it because the system didn't register that I put the bike back, even though the light blinked three times and the box beeped three times. Luckily, I got my $$ back!! I learned that you should receive an email approximately 30 seconds after you put the bike back confirming that it's been returned.

There are many little things here and there like that^, that you learn by just being on campus. For example, when you're wandering around a building that is unfamiliar to you and you ask a staff member if this door leads to a way out and he replies with, "Yes, but I don't know where it leads to," DON'T GO OUT THAT DOOR. You may find yourself trapped in a courtyard but then realize that there is a way out (the opposite way) after five minutes.

Another random tangent- I've discovered probably the coolest bathrooms at UW. They're located inside the Ecology building. You walk in and the dark blue ceiling is covered in twinkling lights like the stars in the sky and there are chirping noises and the bathroom stalls are decorated like phone booths from London. Say whaaaaat?? There are so many random fun and free things to do at UW too, like painting at the Terrace! It was the perfect weather for us to paint and relax the night before school started.

There was also an event called, "The W Project," where someone took a picture of us students on the field at Camp Randall making a "living W." It started to rain while we were standing in the bleachers, waiting to take the picture. About 15 minutes after the rain though, there was the most AMAZING double rainbow. It was worth standing in the rain for + the free t shirt.

Oh, and the fooootball games. They're reeeeally fun and reeeaally exhausting. You're standing for three hours straight and yelling and jumping around until your legs are stiff, but I definitely 10/10 WOULD RECOMMEND getting football tickets freshman year if you're at a university with a good football team! These are pictures from the first game.

Bucky!!!

Learning all of the cheers and when to clap at the right times and yell, "rah rah," is all apart of the "freshman experience," and it's super cheesy but I think that it's best to accept it and just go with the flow.  I can literally already feel myself learning so much academic-wise, too, and I'm excited to see what the next four+ years bring.

Have a great week!
Joy :)

Moving: A Reflection

Hello, friend!

For this week's blog post, I'm just gonna talk about moving and why it's crazy and fun but overall a good thing.

(picture from @drawings_for_my_grandchildren in insta)

At my new school, I meet lots of new people every week who ask me the same questions about moving:

What's different about your new town from your old one?

Do you like Ann Arbor or Madison better?

How does your new school compare to your old one?

 My answers to these questions are, "Well, Madison is 2x the size of Ann Arbor, I like them both(and I can't really compare four years in Ann Arbor to 9 months in Madison), and my new high school is smaller in building size but bigger in population by adding 200 more students than my last school." These answers are short and sweet, and if I am feeling more comfortable with the person or we have enough time, I can go more in depth about what moving is really like. For my readers who have never moved, I will explain what my experiences with moving have been like, and if you have moved, maybe you will be able to compare them to mine and see if we have any similarities. :)

Moving is strange because you are simply stopping your life in one place that you have become familiar with, and beginning it in another. You have to start over with friends, school, street names, landmarks.. even the culture of the new place. For example: I had never heard of cheese curds before moving to Madison. They sound absolutely revolting, but are actually really delicious fried curdled milk. If you have a party in Wisco and didn't have cheese curds, was it really a party?.

There are also some lingering internal questions up in the air, about moving, like, "Who will I ACTUALLY keep in touch with when I move," and, "Is the new city that I'm moving to as great as the place I'm in now?". Moving is just as frightening as it is exciting, because you're going on an adventure outside of your comfort zone(in my opinion, the best stories come from these adventures).

Once you get to your new home, it just takes time to become familiar with it. All your furniture in your old house is in the new one and it seems awkward at first until you make memories in your house like celebrating Christmas, and Halloween. It also takes time to get to know the streets and you celebrate each new place that you can get to without using your GPS. You go to school and realize that there are so many people in the hallways that you see that you will never meet, because you'll only be at this school for a year before college. Navigating the new school can be difficult at first, because you were just in a school that you had known and could have navigated with your eyes closed and now are in a whole new school building where everything is foreign and you don't know how it flows.

Moving can be lonely at times because it is one thing to move away for college as a freshman when everyone else is moving with you, but it is another thing when you are the only one doing it. Even if you have you whole family by your side moving with you, YOU are the only one who can feel YOUR experiences.

It's exciting when you meet new people who resemble other friends you had in your old town, or completely new people who you are grateful for the opportunity to have met them. The biggest benefit of moving are the people. You will have a more diverse knowledge of human beings from different places and backgrounds, and then make some best lifelong friends who you wouldn't have ever met had you not moved. Your familiarity levels just drop a whole lot when you move and can't recognize people everywhere you go, though. Sometimes, it's surprising when you randomly think of people from your old town who you weren't even close friends with, and you wonder how they are doing and what ever happened to so-and-so.

Now that I've moved twice, and visited Ann Arbor after being in Madison for nine months, I can genuinely say that moving to Ann Arbor was a great thing. It was extremely hard at first, but during that trip back, I spent some time thinking about how much I'd learned and how many people I'd met while moving. The friendships that I made in only four years there have changed my life, and they help me to I realize that moving is a literal blessing and  that it is a huge chunk of my story that I am proud of. I definitely believe that it will be the same here in Madison, especially as I transition into college here over the next several months!

Being able to go back to Ann Arbor last month was amazing, and here are some pictures from when I hung out with my friends:

 

Maybe this blog post was long overdue, but I'm just glad that I could put this into words!
Thanks for reading!
Joy :)

Exploring Madison!

Hello, friend!

Last Saturday my brother and I had the opportunity to go downtown and spend some time together. It was a beautiful, sunny, almost 60 degree day out and Luke and I got lunch at this Chinese restaurant, and Jamba Juice afterwards for dessert(there's so much sugar!!).

While we were in Jamba Juice, our parents April Fooled us! They told us that they had gotten into a car accident and that our car was totaled, and that I'd have to drive down Sunday to pick them up. They were out of town last weekend, so I believed them and so did Luke for a while. We found out it was fake when they sent us a picture of "our car." It was the lowest quality picture and that's when we realized we had been fooled!! Sneaky parents..
We decided to walk towards the Capital and just sit on a bench and hang out, enjoying the sun and a man on the corner playing guitar and singing. I got some great pictures of Luke and the statue, "Forward".

After we hung out for about two hours, we decided to head back home and we took Po out on an extra long walk because it was such a beautiful day.

After taking Po out, I went out with my friend Jessica to the Madison Zoo! I had forgotten that there were red pandas there but then I saw it on the sign and I was like, "WE HAVE TO GO SEE THEM!!" They were soooooooo adorable. Lots of families were out and about because of the fantastic weather, and I enjoyed being with a bigger crowd and reliving my childhood a little.

Some weird giant rodent thing.

Jessica and I saw some parrots, giraffes, meerkats, weird monkey things, polar bears, and lemurs which reminded me totally of Zaboomafoo -- do ANY of you guys remember this TV show?? I don't even know how I remember it since it was on air from 1999 to 2001... PBS Kids Go was the best channel.

If you recognized this face props to you!!

After we'd seen almost all the animals, we went back to my house and watched Moana(after getting Po some food!). Then, on Sunday, after church my friend Katie and I went downtown AGAIN, and since it was definitely not as sunny and warm as Saturday, it made you want to go inside the stores and shop around more! Katie took me into this record shop that I had never even seen- I had always walked right past it, and it was really cool because I didn't expect it to have so many modern vinyls. I received a record player as an amazing Christmas present last year, so I was really excited to see some cool albums in stock!

Okay, this one was at Urban Outfitters but THIS IS AMAZING.

I am just so glad that I got to see more of Madison last weekend, and to explore the place where I'll for sure be living the next four years while I'm attending college. It's a beautiful town that has so much more to see! Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great week!

x Joy :)