Whew- getting tired. And sore. Sooooo much walking! Everywhere! Allllll the time! Or at least being on our feet. I’m feeling older and older- my hips, knees, and ankles are all starting to get fussy from being out 14 hours a day. I’m too young for this!
I’m not sure how may times I’ve talked about bagels in the past four days, but I’m sure that Audrey’s sick of it. Lucky for me, I finally got my bagel. And it was delicious.
This morning started in Central Park. We started our three-day “clock” on our New York Passes that basically let us into anything/anywhere for free. We tried to rent bikes but ended up with an old-school tandem bike. After a mildly terrifying start to the ride where I may or may not have thought we were going to crash and die, we went back to the bike store and, luckily, they had a couple extra single bikes that we were able to rent instead. We got to spend the next hour and a half making the 5+ mile loop on the outer bike path in Central Park. Even though it’s winter and there’s just a lot of brown, it’s still a surprisingly pretty area- especially compared to the rest of the concrete-jungle-type city. Another “NY food must,” we grabbed hot dogs on our ride through the park for lunch.
Bike riding in Central Park
Our bicycle built for two
Since Audrey and I are remarkably different people, we had quite different priorities on our trip. We decided to split up to check out museums for the afternoon. She headed to Guggenheim while I made a beeline for the Museum of Natural History. Since we only had a couple of hours, I sped through the African Mammals and Earth & Space exhibits, glancing through four floors in about 90 minutes- less than ideal but at least I got to see it.
Can't do a natural history museum without seeing the dinosaurs!
After a quick snack (a knish) and picking up a random bus that looked convenient, I headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). . With almost 2,000,000 pieces of art in about 1000 exhibit halls and galleries, the entire experience is overwhelming in scale alone. I expected to be be quickly bored by rooms and room sof painting and drawing, but was totally blown away at what I found. My favorite galleries were the arms and armor rooms, full of guns, knives, swords, and centuries worth of armor. The other highlight was the Egyptian temple…like…the WHOLE TEMPLE. It was huge and you couple walk in it and everything! The scale alone was impresive, but considering the location and age of the exhibit made it even more impressive that it would have been otherwise. I could have spent an entire day wandering through the Met, but only just scratched the surface. I checked out the Roman and Greek sculptures too and decided that humans have really like portraying the male figure for a verrrrry long time. There are figures and depictions from all over the world at all different periods in time that show the same thing. Just thought that was interesting.
Stained glass at the Met
Suits of armor at the Met
Egyptian temple at the Met
Audrey and I met back up for dinner tonight at the Time Warner Center. From there, we went to go see Anything Goes. It’s a fun, flashy, “fluffy” show full of catchy, showy numbers, tap dancing, and lots of jazz hands- right up my alley. It’s set on a cruise ship and is really a great time. Fun love stories, mistaken identities, lots of comedy, lots of closure at the end. Definitely a favorite.
Jazz hands for Anything Goes
We finished off the evening with a late night trip to Top of the Rock, a view of NYC from the Rockefeller Center. The whole city that we’ve started to learn and be familiar with was lit up with all those recognizable landmarks. From the 67thfloor, Manhattan started to look like the map that I’ve been spending so much time studying- all the streets laid out in beautiful grids, a calm dark rectangle for Central Park, and climbing skyscrapers lit up with dots of lights on every floor. In the distance, we could see the darker outer boroughs and New Jersey across the river. There isn’t darkness in any direction because of the east coast megalopolis (all those giant cities one after another). The expansiveness of that urban environment appears endless.
Looking out from Rockefeller. That's the Empire State Building in green
Looking out from the Rockefeller Center