Saturday 8 August - Day 2 in NYC

Saturday in a nutshell:

- Had a delicious brunch in Sarabeth's, a cafe on the south side of Central Park
- Little dander around Central Park
- The Met
- Walked across and up the park to The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine
- Walked back to our hotel via the American Museum of Natural History
- Walked across the road from our hotel for some pizza because we were too exhausted to walk further

1. Brunch in Sarabeth's

I had the lemon and ricotta pancakes which were ok, Chris had eggs benedict. Pretty tasty food but I made the mistake of ordering English Breakfast Tea.  It was unrecognisable as tea and not enjoyable at all. Next time I'll stick to coffee, which the Americans seem to do reasonably well.

Fast forward about 20 minutes and this plate was empty!

2. Walk in Central Park

As we learned in yesterday's bus tour, there are 9000 benches in central park and we found a couple to perch on.

Apparently there are 24000 trees in there too.

Weird to think that this park is man made, ie someone decided that that rock should go there...

Beautiful trees and skyscrapers

There was a body of water on the east side of the park where people were sailing little boats with electric sails. I'm pretty sure that I've seen this in a movie but cannot remember which one.

Also by this body of water, was a story telling group called 'Hans Christian Anderson Storytelling' or something which apparently happens every Saturday at 11am. There was a fantastic woman telling a story to a group of assembled kids, parents and random bystanders (including us) and we stayed to listen to one which was entitled 'The Story of Maybella the Mouse'.

Once upon a time there was a little mouse called Maybella. Now Maybella lived happily with her mother and father in their mouse home, and her parents strove to make sure that she was happy and safe. Her father was a wise mouse and he taught her the following rules.

1. 'Maybella', he said. 'When you are out and about make sure that you open your EARS and LISTEN.'

2. 'Maybella, when you are out and about make sure that you open your EYES and LOOK AROUND YOU.'

3. 'Maybella, always act fast and think fast.'

And so Maybella grew up

2.2 Cleopatra's Needle

Cleopatra's needle (it's straight in real life, Chris's panorama set it slightly askew)

3. The Met

Man, this was amazing. I am a HUGE Van Gogh fan and have been to la musee d'orsay, which has a whole room dedicated to the guy, more times than I can count.

Chris outside the Met

A few pics that stood out:

I think this one was buy a Polish artist. It's ~160 (though fewer in this display) pictures of Nazis in film. The point of it is to show how we can only attempt to understand the horror of what happened when it's presented to us neatly in a fictionalised format.

Van Gogh:

Probably my favourite Van Gogh ever

Monet:

There was this artist who had gone around the world (5 continents, 37 countries) taking pictures of buildings. From these images, he made a gorgeous slideshow displayed on two enormous screens. Chris and I sat in this exhibition for about 15 minutes before some rowdy Americans came in and drove us away. Chris in particular was mesmerised. 

Good old Andy Warhol, enriching the world with his art: 

                                         

Not exactly to my taste... 

One random one that caught my eye: 

It's the kind of thing you can imagine people mocking and saying 'pfft so easy, they call this art' etc, but I think this is pretty clever. The shades are gorgeous and I like that it loops back to yellow. That said, I'm sure that I wouldn't pay whatever it was sold for... 

4. The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine

Apparently this is the biggest cathedral in the world and, after my visit, I can believe it. It's beautiful - with gorgeous, high stained-glass windows. It was my first time in a non-Catholic cathedral (I think) and it was interesting to compare. They had only one small stand of votive candles and far fewer statues. I think I spotted only one Jesus-on-the-cross up by the alter.

They had some beautiful decorative pieces that had been gifted by various royalty, including two very ornate Japanese vases and two cabinets from the King of Siam which had taken 8 months to produce.

My favourite thing about the cathedral was that they had a special exhibition, in the form of a collection of quotations and photographs, celebrating the 80th birthday of the Dalai Lama. I thought it was wonderfully progressive and a true sign of tolerance and peace that a Christian church would hold that kind of display.

Some of pictures from inside the church:

Amen.

5. American Museum of Natural History

This rock:

is apparently 4556 billion years old.

Yeowza

Now have some big cats:

Meow. 

6. Quick drink and pizza

We crashed shortly after this. 

Summary

Distance walked: 18.0 km, wore through a pair of socks
Thought for the day: We could really use a selfie stick.

Friday 7 August - Day 1 in NYC

Friday in a nutshell:

- Walk from West 57th to Times Square
- Breakfast in a super-American diner that was hideously overpriced and grossed at Times Square
- Queued for an hour outside Madam Tussauds to book 'The Ride' bus tour
- Walked to the Empire State Building
- Went to this Skyride virtual tour of New York on L2 of the Empire State building (which I DO NOT recommend)
- Travelled up the Empire State building to the Observation Deck on L86
- Had a Starbucks in times square (like proper New Yorkers)
- Went on 'The Ride' bus tour
- Dinner in Koreatown on 32nd street
- WaxWorks in Madam Tussauds
- Went home and crashed completely

1. Walk from West 57th to Times Square

We set off at around 7am because we were still in UK time and totally raring to go. Naturally the first thing I did was locate my work's NY office.

Literally the first photo we took on our first day in NYC...

That's us, on the screen at times square!

2. Breakfast in the diner

Feeling a little hungry, we went down through Times Square and found Brooklyn diner. It was good to eat but I was pretty horrified by their use of vinegar in their eggs benedict recipe. Not good, did not enjoy. Even now when I think of it I feel a little bit ill. But I was hungry and it cost like a million dollars so I was good and ate it up.

Waiting for our breakfast and browsing the guide book

Vinegar on these eggs? Really? You wound me, Mr Chef. 

Setting us up for the day

3. Queuing for the Ride

This was ridiculously stressful. The queue was really long down 42nd street and was split across the pavement.

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(The stars are people.) This mean that people joining the queue didn't notice the queue on the right and immediately joined the queue on the left which was about a fifth of the total queue size. Then someone would tell them that the queue was actually 5 times longer than they had realised and it as interesting to see how different people reacted. There were people who laughed and were like 'oh dear!' and people who looked shocked and grumpy and people who didn't want to move etc.

We queued there for like an hour then hopped on over to the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING.

4. Skyride Virtual Tour of the city

This was horrible. They pretended you were in some kind of flying vehicle and the seats actually moved around. In addition to feeling horribly motion sick, the video was in ridiculously low resolution which really didn't add to the whole experience. The footage was out of date, eg included the twin towers. They claimed this was to honour the memory of those who died but really I think it was because they cba updating their footage. 20 horrible minutes that I will never get back (though I will admit that it was nice seeing a birds eye view of central park. It helped me to navigate when were were there the following day.)

5. Up the Empire State Building

We went only to L86. There were 16 more levels but we decided 86 was plenty. We were hardcore and walked up the stairs from 80 - 86.

Having climbed 6 flights

Pretty amazing views up there, as you can imagine.

View from the top of the Empire State building. You can see the Statue of Liberty somewhere in the distance

Adorable selfie, but you kind of can't see anything except our giant heads... 

The nice Empire-State-Building woman took a picture of us:

We look like real Americans, don't we?

6. Starbucks break at Times Square

Feeling pretty tired and killing time before our bus tour, we grabbed a drink in Starbucks on Times Square. Even the Starbucks had sparkly lights.

Chris got a cold coffee, I got a sugary fruit drink. Standard. 

I'm really missing English Breakfast Tea by now, but I made do with some fruity green tea concoction that is pretty good in the heat.

7. The Ride Bus Tour

We hopped on the this tour bus where all the seats point to the side and one side is made of glass. The idea is that you travel around the city with 2 commentators and every now and again someone on the street entertains you. We had a break dancer, a saxophonist, a rapper, a contemporary dancer, a ballerina and a singer who sang 'New York, New York'.

The commentators were Scott and Jack and I learned lots of interesting facts:

- Central park is 843 acres (though I don't speak acres)
- The crysler building has a pointy spike on top that was the subject of a 10 year legal dispute. The spike was raised out of the top at the last minute by the architect to try to make the building taller to beat the empire state building. Mr Crysler thought it was tacky and didn't want to pay for it. Eventually, he lost the case and had to pay.
- Toys R Us in Times Square has the 3rd largest indoor ferris wheel
- Toys R Us in Times Square is closing because their rent is going from 12m/year to 50m/year - I hope I heard these number correctly... I think it sounds like too much.
- It's 'Grand Central Terminal', not 'Grand Central Station'
- The New York Public Library goes way underground and has like 130 miles of books.
- The only part of the NY Public Library that you can take books from is the children's section.
- In the children's section they have the original toys that the characters in Winnie the Pooh are based on, except Roo which the real Christopher Robin kept for himself.
- They kept making a joke about DuaneReade, saying that it was a small family-run business and we should go in there to support the small businesses. It's really a massive chain and there is one on every corner. We can't help noticing them everywhere now.
- AMC theatre was wheeled 70ft down the road on 42nd street.

Aboard 'The Ride' bus tour

This guy was part of it and danced along the pavement sidewalk

8. Dinner in Koreatown

Cheap, cheerful and really really tasty.

That one on the top right is Anchovies and I accidently took a huge bite of them. Gross.  

Rice and meat

Adding egg and cheese

9. Madame Tussauds

They fooled us! It was like 6pm when we went in and it didn't look like there was a queue. They lied! There was a medium sized queue inside and by this point we were so tired we were taking turns stopping for a rest.

I'm not a twilight fan, not at all, I swear

Judy Garland in her happy place

The quality of the waxworks was really varied. Sofia Vergara was terrible - such a beautiful woman and her waxwork was terrifying. This one, on the other hand, of Stephen Spielberg was incredibly well done

The King of Bollywood

Katniss!

Anderson Cooper was insanely lifelike

Hemingway and me

Ghandi

My verdict: wax works are really really creepy.

Summary

We were so tired by the time we got back! Times square was a bit too chaotic for us but we were glad to have seen it.

Distance we walked: 13.9km
Verdict: I never want to see Times Square again for the rest of my life
EOD: Slept for 12 hours straight, best night's sleep I've had in a long time, was too tired to realise that I hadn't brushed my teeth before I went to bed