I love looking at old travel pictures. Besides bringing back so many wonderful memories, they give me the reassurance that I have indeed grown up over the past few years, albeit very slightly.

My visit to the Statue of Liberty was testimony of this. Since the conversation about New York City has come up a few times recently, I decided to look through pictures from my very first visit to New York and the United States back in 2009. And boy, I know people have often called me childish, but if they had seen how I behaved back then, they would probably think I am a proper mature adult now.

The visit started normally enough. We made our way from Wall Street to Battery Park Ferry Terminal rather uneventfully, except for some cheeky stranger who deliberately told us to take the wrong Subway line and me pretending that the clouds were speech bubbles.

And off we went to Liberty Island, leaving Manhattan behind us.

When we got there, we took the obligatory picture with the Statue of Liberty…

As well as the Manhattan skyline that we had just left behind.

And things started to go downhill from there. As if something had snapped, all hell broke loose and I started coming up with the most ridiculous poses.

Then I pretended I was in Pisa.

You can actually see how stupid I looked from another angle and how my poor siblings had to accommodate my request.

Please note that none of these were meant to be offensive to the respected Statue as well as to the people of America. It was merely a reaction of an overexcited tourist who did not know what to do with herself.

But then again, perhaps I was simply childish, as my other pictures from the trip seem to suggest, even in the absence of the Statue of Liberty.

At my brother’s university science lab for example.

Or at the campus garden, photobombing an otherwise very pretty picture of my mom.

I clearly had too much fun at Toys ‘R’ Us…

Oh well, there is a child in all of us, right? 🙂