First Trip to NYC

It was 1986 and I was ten years old. My mother, father, brother, uncle and his fiance all took the train to New York. I had never been, so I was super excited. New York was The Big Apple, it was where people went to become a star, and it was the most famous city in the world. This day was guaranteed to be fun and adventurous. The city was booming with lots of different people and movement and taxi cabs. We actually rode in a yellow cab, which then became the topic of conversation for the next hour about how unfriendly the driver was and how expensive the brief ride turned out to be.
There are three things I remember most about this trip. First is the grotesque smell of chestnuts. It was EVERYWHERE and it smelled like barf. The second is going to Central Park to find the Hans Christian Anderson statue that my third grade teacher told us all about. Being out-of-towners, we clearly were never going to find one statue in all of Central Park. But I wouldn't shut up about trying to locate it, so my father flagged down a jogger. Big mistake, I thought to myself. New Yorkers were mean and rude and unhelpful. This guy was gonna curse us out and spit on us. Oh how wrong I was. He kindly gave us detailed instructions and told us that it was just a little ways away. Lo and behold, this gentleman was a rare gem and he got us right to the statue. We took a slew of photos and it was the true highlight of the trip. The third thing I remember most...well, that's a story for another time...