I LEGO New York

Cherith sent me this link from the NY Times's Abstract Blog, where Christopher Neimann put together a rendition his remembrances of New York City, in LEGOs, while living in Berlin. 

I love this for some many reasons. On a nostalgic level, because I was a LEGO child. I grew up with a big blue plastic bin of LEGO pieces, which I spent countless hours organizing into separate piles: smooth pieces, specialty pieces (such as steering wheels, kitchen sinks, flowers), 2x4 blocks, etc. In fact, many days when I was home "sick" were spent organizing LEGO pieces. In anticipation of building some grand structure. Most times, the organization itself took all of my effort and attention span, and after a few hours, I would lose interest, and would dump it all back into the same blue plastic bin to clean up for dinner. You would think that maybe my mom would have bought me separate containers for the organized bits, but perhaps she realized that the actual fun for me was in the organization itself. Or maybe she was just sadistic and secretly enjoyed watching me spend my whole childhood preparing for a structure that was never actually built. 

The other reason why I love LEGOs is because they represent this whole other world. Of neatly organized towns with homes that had window boxes with plastic flowers and bathtubs created from smooth pieces. And of gas stations that were snapped together brick by brick, in anticipation of the tanker truck kits that might appear in my Christmas stocking. 

When Kenny and I went to Denmark about ten years ago, visiting LEGOland was high on my list things to do. We never made it though, because it was not in Copehagen...as theme parks are wont to be, it was in some small town in the middle of nowhere. As a kid growing up, my family never had the money to buy enough LEGO sets so that I could create an entire LEGO world in some spare bedroom (which we did not have either), like I imagined the super lucky kids having. So visiting LEGOland was like travling to Mecca, for me, a land of dreams deferred. It is the world of "what if we had had so much money that we could've afford to buy every single LEGO set in existence to create an entire LEGO universe?!" Forget Disney World as a child, I wanted to go to LEGOland. While I could have cared less about seeing Mickey or riding in a stupid whirling tea cup, I so wanted to see a life size tree made from LEGOS.