Summer in the Park

My last weekend spent in New York City was amazing.

On Friday night, a bunch of girls from Centro Maria and I went to Central Park to watch a part of New York City’s Summer in the Park series. The night we went, the performers were two different dance companies. We were late and missed most of the first half of the show (thank goodness), which was modern dancing. The second half was hip-hop. The performance ranged from mind-boggling awesome to creepy-weird, so overall it was a great show. There was a lot of break-dancing and cool things like that, and a lot of back flips and hand-springs. The choreographer came out and danced a solo piece himself, but that was my very least favorite part of the show, because the music was full of sporadic startling screams and he looked a lot like what I would imagine the devil to look like while he danced.

But even though his solo piece was too scary for me, his choreography in the other pieces was really neat. The most amazing thing in the entire show was when one guy came out from behind one of the curtains doing back hand-springs across the stage. When he got about three-fourth of the way across the stage, he used his momentum to propel himself into a complete back flip. But it wasn’t just any back flip. While he was flipping, his legs were out and it looked almost as if he was walking around a circle in the air. It was incredible.

After the show was over, we all walked back to Centro Maria. But on our way, we decided that we wanted ice cream. Because who doesn’t love ice cream on a hot summer night?

None of us knew of any really good places, until Julie (a native French speaker from Montreal) told us in her cute little voice of a great place she had been to the other day that was in Hells Kitchen, a small neighborhood really close to Centro Maria that is filled to the brim with delicious restaurants. That sounded great to us, so we followed Julie. The way she had described the ice cream shop made it sound really cute and small and perfectly New York, so when we stopped outside Cold Stone Creamery, I laughed. No one understood why I had laughed, and being one of the only Americans in the group, I didn’t know how to explain why I had laughed. But I guess that for them, Cold Stone is a very authentic United States experience (even if it isn’t authentically New York for me).