One of the art majors said our week in New York felt like a week of another life. For that week, I thought of myself less as a college student than a walking, breathing set of eyes. Home was 113th and Amsterdam Street. The new breakfast routine was a 30-cent roll and orange juice from the market across the street; dinner was the warmest hole-in-the-wall we could find when our feet got too tired. Every hour in between, we looked at as much art as our eyes and sketchbooks could handle.

Tuesday, 12 November
Eleven art majors and two professors board the plane, and it’s not a secret to anyone. Mysha pans seats of sleeping people with a video camera; SunYoung and I are furiously sketching clouds. Post-sunrise glare on the rivers make it look like sun gods have laid fat gold necklaces in the creases of the hills.

Wednesday
Central Park! We pull on running clothes and run through the hostel lobby. There it is still sleepy, but when we get to the park runners in North Face zoom by. We scramble down the famous boulders and pathways. Later our class crosses the same stretch of paths, all in a line like little ducklings behind the professors. We see Richard Prince work in the Guggenheim and I’m not impressed—though one of his gilded car hoods would look great as frat house wall art. I like an Impressionist Vuillard with smears of light yellow paint on tall French buildings. In the next room, an elementary teacher stands with his students in front of a Kandinsky. “What do you see that reminds you of something real?” They see eyelashes. A stage. A boat. A cog on a clock. The back of a pig. Everybody giggles.

It’s our first day of real city mingling. My most common thought: “Her feet must hurt!”

Thursday
Museum of Modern Art. MOMA. The temple we’ve talked about all semester in my Modern Art History class is a normal building with shiny floors and lots of people waiting to enter. The museum is vast—I stop at the Monet room benches to breathe and calm my eyes with waterlilies. The moment my head starts to swim with art, I meet an Italian gallery owner and we take a coffee break. I understand why he likes minimalism when he explains how the decorative frills on buildings in Milan make his eyes hurt because they’re everywhere. On Manhattan, though, the buildings mimic the minimalist cube, so I am craving classics.

Later, I get lost in Matisse paintings, left behind and forced to have an adventure. As the sun goes down, I walk 20 blocks to the gallery district in Chelsea. The neighborhood looks industrial, so at first it’s hard to believe that this is the gallery hotspot in the art capital of the country. Bright, open doors are right next to unloading platforms. My favorite discovery is a photo exhibit called Sundial, by Uta Barth. The images are simple—squares of light hitting walls inside a home, bending into a corner or lighting up a sofa.

Friday
Tired. Cold. We wave hello to the Statue of Liberty and book it back to a subway.

Saturday
Mysha does her performance piece, sewing people’s initials into her tongue in front of the MOMA. I feel a little like a celebrity just knowing her. In the last hours of our last night, we finally get to the Metropolitan Museum. After all the modern museums it seems like a glowing palace with its marble stairs, plush carpets, high ceilings, cases full of flickering gold relics and a Stradivari cello. I could have curled up and slept there.