NYC TRIP

On July 25th, 2025 I took a trip to NYC to both visit a friend and see the sights. It was a total of 5 days, and I had a great time.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect? I don’t travel all that often, and I’ve never been to the east coast so this was entirely new to me! We did a lot – I made my pilgrimage to Stonewall, saw my first Keith Haring in person, saw oodles and oodles of museums, and enjoyed great food. This is a digital shrine dedicated to all the fun things I did and saw while I was there.

All these photos are either from my Nokia 2780 flip, or my friend’s Fuji film camera.

Before I left, I got a bunch of my friends and I together to prep as many stickers for NYC as we could. I love stickers, graffiti, tags, you name it…. Something something freedom of expression, something human instinct to leave a mark, and something something !

I spent the next few days covering all the places I went to as many stickers as humanly possible. Some of these are mine, others are from my besties. I hope that someone ends up reading this and seeing one. If you do, please let me know! They’re all over – and I mean ALL OVER.

❮ ❯

GREENWICH / EAST VILLAGE

Speaking of graffiti and art, I got to see my FIRST Keith Haring in person! Huge, if you know any Jo lore. Went and saw his large bathroom mural and one of his sculptures in Greenwich.

While I was there, I made my religious pilgrimage to the stony Mecca of all manner of either ors and in-betweens; Stonewall. I'm playing up the spiritual metaphors, but being able to see it in person was strangely... religious. Seeing two huge monoliths for the queer community in one day maybe broke my brain a little lol...

Also had the best bagel of my life and REALLY good pizza.

NYC Museums

My friend, the one I went to visit, actually works at a big art museum in NYC. Apparently that means he gets free tickets + free guest tickets to all the OTHER big art museums in NYC for…. Reasons? I won’t question it!!! We went to both the Museum of Modern Art (The MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met).

The MoMA had this interesting exhibit about an architectural project that sort of fell off but now maintains a cult-like group dedicated to this avante garde architectural ethos. The funniest part of the trip was going there and listening to the music a composer made to be put in the lobby. No seriously, go listen to it. Imagine coming to this hotel to stay the night and you’re greeted with… that. No thank you! Otherwise it was really interesting, there was a 3d interactable render of the state of the buildings, one of the pods of the Nagakin Capsule Tower, and videos of the architect, Kisho Kurakawa talking about his vision for this new philosophy.

The Met was something else entirely, I love modern art as much as the next guy, but I won’t lie I’m a BIG fan of post-industrial painting movements, classical sculpture, and Spanish colonial art, so the Met was like a buffet for the starving (me). It was so, so cool. I actually got to see the Met an hour before it opened, and seeing some of these halls empty? So surreal, and I think I got some of my best pictures from that time.

Hi! I'm not quite done with this, but I've been working on it for a week and want to post it already!!! Come back to see more gif ugliness in your future...