Week 44 - USA - New York

On Monday morning, we woke up when the lights were turned on to serve breakfast at 5.30 am. We landed at JFK Airport at 7.00 am and we managed to collect our bags and sail through customs with no problems. However they did take our photographs and fingerprints from both hands.

We caught a shuttle bus with an entertaining driver for the scenic drive through Queens, then Downtown and Midtown where other passengers were dropped off and then finally to our hostel at Central Park West in Uptown. We had a tiny room on the 5^th floor for USD 99 a night. We caught the metro to Canal Street and walked into Chinatown where we enjoyed a much anticipated Yum Cha washed down with copious amounts of Chinese tea. The streets in the area were overrun with young "brothers" all selling copy watches and hand bags, counting money surreptitiously and keeping an eye out for the cops. After lunch we walked up Broadway to find a T. J. Maxx store. When we tracked it down we managed to buy coats, socks, hats, scarves and gloves so that we were properly prepared for the New York weather. It was just as well we did because shortly after we left the store, we saw our first snowflakes falling out of the sky. We walked further up Broadway to Union Square and checked out the colourful Christmas markets there. The streets were such a mix of people and every second person seemed to be speaking a different language which was easily established as every second person was on their mobile phone. For dinner, we went to the Food Emporium – a deli-supermarket – where we tried a hot pastrami sandwich. It was absolutely delicious as it was crammed with a generous amount of warm pastrami, melted cheese, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato. We decided to call it a night and hobbled to the subway where we caught a couple of trains back to the hostel. Outside the hostel, the cars were covered in a fine dusting of snow.

We had a sleep-in on Tuesday and then spent some time in the basement checking our emails before heading out for the day. There was no breakfast included in our room rate so our first stop was a little cafe called L'Exquisitus, where we had a large mug of coffee each and shared a delicious salmon and cream cheese bagel followed by a fruit salad with yoghurt. Despite the cold (22°F), it was a really beautiful morning. The sun was shining and the sky was blue, so we decided to walk downtown through Central Park. Apart from a few hardy dog walkers, Central Park was deserted. Almost all the trees had dropped their leaves except for a few conifers. We walked along the paths with the remnants of last night's snow fall crunching beneath our feet, meandering past the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir where we saw ducks and coots. Across the reservoir, we had a fantastic view of the city skyline. We saw some squirrels, sparrows, finches, jays and a large hawk.

We turned onto Broadway to Columbus Circle to see if Best Buy could help us with a 32GB memory card. They couldn't, but sent us on to B & H Photo & Video at 34^th street. This was an amazing Jewish run business. It was the largest photographic shop we had ever seen. They had an information stand near the front door where an old Jewish man sat reading the Torah with a young Afro-American girl standing next to him providing help. At the service counters they had bowls of sweets so that you could have a sweet while you were waiting. The shop was manned by an army of Orthodox Jews. Near the entrance of the store there was a lady handing out free water, coke and cups of pretzels. Above you a noisy conveyor belt sent green crates whizzing around the shop at high speed. We found out later that these were orders flying down to the collection area. After you ordered your goods from the sales people they printed a receipt and an order which you took downstairs to the bank of cashiers and paid. You then went to a separate counter to pick up your goods before leaving the store.

We caught the subway back to Canal Street and Chinatown and found the Shanghai Cafe on Mott Street where we had Xia Long Bao dumplings. These were amazing tiny pork and crab soup dumplings that we first tasted in Shanghai China. These were hand-made at the front of the store and steamed on cabbage leaves in a bamboo basket. To eat them you dip them in black vinegar and then bite a small hole in the top to suck out the hot soup before eating the rest.

Afterwards we walked through Chinatown and then along Fifth Avenue to see the shops, Christmas themed windows and Christmas lights. We stopped at a diner for dinner and then we continued our walk along Fifth Avenue past the limestone Empire State Building and the New York Public Library with a magnificent white staircase flanked by lions until we reached 42^nd Street. At this point we turned off and headed towards Times Square and the theatre district. Times Square was an assault upon our senses. It was full of gaudy billboards, flashing neon signs and large electronic advertising screens. After walking around the square where we were accosted by spruikers who were trying to sell tickets to a comedy show, we walked to the nearest subway station to catch the Metro back to the hostel. We got off one stop early and bought milk, bananas and cereal for breakfast. Back at the hostel, we fell into bed exhausted. It had been a long day.

After breakfast on Wednesday, we spent some time on the internet in the hostel's basement lounge, before walking to the Post Office to find out how much it was going to cost to post our stuff home and buy some packaging. Then we caught the subway to the last stop on Manhattan Island and found ourselves back in Chinatown. We started making our way towards the river, stopping at a food market for a lunch of roast duck and noodles on the way. Further south at East River, we had to make a little loop past Police Plaza (NYPD headquarters) and through the ornate archway of City Hall onto the Brooklyn Bridge bike path and walkway. We walked most of the way across the bridge where we had beautiful views of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

We walked back to Manhattan and then headed south through the financial district to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. We waited for the free ferry and stood out the front admiring the view of sunset on the Statue of Liberty. It was icy cold over the water and when we reached Staten Island we stayed in the terminal and got straight on another ferry going back.

We walked up Broadway past Wall Street and the big bronze bull, stopping at Borders bookshop for a browse in the warmth. We continued to walk up Broadway looking for somewhere for dinner and searching for some jeans for Suzie. We bought some Levis eventually at half the price we pay in Australia. After stopping in No Ho for dinner, we found a metro station on 6^th Avenue and headed back to the hostel.

On Thursday, we went back to the Post Office to post our parcel. It weighed over 12 lbs, so we were very happy to be rid of it! Then we caught the subway to the Rockefeller Centre to take in the views of New York City from the "Top of the Rock" observation deck. There were three open air observation decks and it was a sunny clear morning so we had unobstructed views of the city in all directions. We could even see the Goldman Sachs Building across the river in New Jersey!

Afterwards, we caught a subway back to Chinatown where we had a lovely lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant. While we were eating lunch there was a small altercation near the front of the restaurant. Apparently a small Asian male customer started throwing his soup at a couple of female customers. When the staff remonstrated with him, he took exception and started swearing, cursing and threw his remaining soup on the floor. He was thrown out of the restaurant, however when we left the restaurant, we saw him hanging around outside and peering in the windows. Just another New York psycho!

After lunch, we slowly made our way back uptown, stopping to try some egg tarts and to buy a bottle of wine to share with Bill (who Keith worked with in Sydney) and his wife Louisa. Back at the hostel, we had a quick shower and then caught the subway to Penn Street where we caught the Long Island Rail Road to Locust Valley to meet Bill. Bill collected us from the station and we dropped into Friends Academy (where he and Louisa have taught for over 22 years) to pick up his books before heading to their apartment for a pre-dinner drink and chat. We spent a couple of hours chatting, met their daughters Kira and Katrina, and then Bill drove us to the Bryant & Cooper steak house. At the front of the steak house there was a window through which we could see big sides of beef that had been hung up to age. Inside the majority of the clientele were males and it was very noisy. We had gorgonzola salad and clams casino (similar to oysters Kilpatrick) to start, followed by porterhouse (T-bone) steak for three, with creamed spinach, sautéed mushrooms, broccoli hollandaise and mashed potato. The steak was enormous and although it was delicious and cooked to perfection we couldn't finish it. After dinner, Bill and Louisa dropped us off at Manhasset station, where we caught a train back to Penn Station and then the subway back to the hostel. We had a really great time, it was so good to share a glass of red wine (excellent Nieto Senetiner Malbec 2009) and Louisa gave us a free pass to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During breakfast on Friday, we booked our flight on the internet with Jet Blue to Washington DC. This meant we had an extra day in New York (originally we were planning to drive out of New York on Sunday morning to avoid the mind blowing traffic), and would save on the car rental by hiring it a few days later in Washington DC. The car rental quote was substantially cheaper than renting the car from New York. It appears that everything is more expensive in New York. A couple of girls we talked to in the hostel told us that it was cheaper to buy almost anything on the West Coast.

After breakfast, we walked to 105^th Street and Columbus to drop off our laundry. It was very busy with heaps of black ladies in there doing their washing. Then we got on the subway and headed for the Meat Packing District and Chelsea Market. It was a glorious day, clear sky and the warmest day we had had so far. On the subway, we saw some young black guys with their pants half way down their thighs. Suzie was itching to ask them how they managed to defy gravity as when they stood up their pants should have fallen down, but they didn't.

We walked from the 14^th Street subway to Chelsea Market which was a pretty upmarket place with beautiful food and other goods. We saw great bakeries, meat and seafood stalls with the freshly steamed bright red lobsters most memorable. After a delicious carpolocco ham sandwich from a deli and some dried cantaloupe dipped in chocolate, we walked through the Meat Packing district on Bleeker Street towards Greenwich Village and then turned south on Lafayette towards the financial downtown area. Along the way we walked past memorable buildings, gorgeous restaurants, boutiques, parks and gardens. We stopped and bought a piece of New York cheesecake at Pasticceria Rocco and ate it on a bench at the neighbouring Father Demo Park. We saw lots of plump, fluffy brown squirrels at City Hall Park where there was a beautiful fountain framed by decorative winter plants and the surrounding skyscrapers. We stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for a donut and then St Pauls chapel with George Washington's pew carefully preserved along with a lot of 9/11 memorabilia. Out the back was a cemetery and across the road the twin towers site which was alive with construction work. Next to this was a Century 21 department store where we found a couple of hard cases at a bargain price which we decided to buy even though we were unsure if they would fit in the rental car boot! Then we wheeled our new purchases down Broadway to Borders to get a road atlas of the USA for the upcoming road trip.

We caught the subway home and dropped off the two cases before heading back on the subway to Hell's Kitchen for dinner. We walked up and down the main drag with numerous restaurants on either side. Spoilt for choice we opted for a tiny Indian place where we had pappadums, pepper lamb fry, spicy okra, naan and rice. It was all freshly made with large amounts of spice including dried chillis and ginger. We ate every grain and stopped on the way home at a Donut Ice Cream shop where we had chocolate, Irish Coffee and raspberry ripple home-made ice cream. If you have money then New York is definitely one of the best places in the world to be.

On Saturday morning, we booked our accommodation in Washington DC and chatted to Hiroko from Japan. It turned out that Hiroko was also going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art so we caught the subway together to 81^st Street and walked across Central Park to the museum. It was so cold that the lakes in Central Park had begun to freeze over.

Nothing had really prepared us for the size of the museum. With well over three million items in seventeen departments, we didn't know where to start. At the Information Desk, we found that there were several guided tours available with a "Highlights of the Museum" tour starting in forty five minutes. While we were waiting for the tour to start we bought a book of the highlights of the museum and browsed through the Greek and Roman collections. There we saw some fine mosaics and some red and blue painted walls from Roman mansions. The walls were painted with pillars, fountains and urns.

Our tour guide, Sherry started the tour by taking us to the Greek Galleries where we admired the Kouros (athlete) sculpture. Then we visited the Roman Galleries to see a temporary exhibit – a magnificent 300AD mosaic floor excavated from a mansion in Lod, Israel. At the African Galleries, Sherry pointed out a wooden sculpture of a Dogon couple from Mali and a modern art piece made from aluminium wine bottle tops and copper wire (which we weren't too excited by). In the Pacific Islands collection, we saw a ceiling from a ceremonial hut constructed from shields (the shields were made to commemorate a successful head hunt!) and some bis poles (decorative poles carved from tree trunks and used to hang head hunting trophies). We saw a neo-classical sculpture of Perseus with the head of Medusa in the European Sculpture collection before heading past the Christmas Tree to the Medieval Art collection where we looked at a walnut Virgin and Child Reliquary from Auvergne and a limestone Virgin and Child sculpture from Bourgogne.

Then we went to the American Wing which was once a separate museum that had been cleverly joined on the main building by a glass roof structure. It had a neo-classical facade with Ionic columns and vertical windows that had once been part of a bank. We admired a beautiful porch/loggia designed by Charles Tiffany. It had beautiful columns, topped with capitals constructed from ceramic peonies, magnolias, lotuses and poppies with fine glass stems. There were beautiful glass tiles in a frieze above the columns and in the porch were beautiful lamps and windows painted with flowers.

Our final stop was the European paintings collection where Sherry pointed out "The Harvester" by Pieter Bruegel, a "Madonna and Child" by Duccio (the museum paid $43 million for this item ten years ago), a self portrait by Rembrandt and a portrait of Juan de Pareja by Velazquez.

By this time we were ready for lunch so we made our way to the cafeteria where had soup and sandwiches before heading back to the galleries.

The Islamic Art galleries were closed for renovation, but we were able to see a small part of the collection on a balcony before going back to the European paintings collection. We spent the next few hours browsing though paintings by Rembrandt, Velazquez, van Dyck, Titian, Tintoretto, Vermeer, Gossart, Fra Angelico, El Greco, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Monet, Manet, Picasso, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas and others. While we were shopping for carpets in Kashmir, we had seen some copies of silk rugs that were held in the Met so we tried to find them without success. Instead we found ourselves looking at Chinese sculptures, paintings and porcelain in the Chinese and Asian galleries.

We made our way to the American Wing and visited a series of "period rooms" full of stunning furniture. On our way out of the museum, we walked through part of the Egyptian Art collection and the reconstructed Temple of Dendur which was even surrounded by a water-filled moat! We left the museum after 7.00 pm after having spent over eight hours there.

We caught a subway to Hell's Kitchen, where after wandering around a bit we settled on the Pam Real Thai Food restaurant for dinner. It was really delicious and the closest thing to real Thai food that we'd had in a while. After dinner we caught the subway back to the hostel and then crashed – exhausted after yet another long day.

After breakfast on Sunday, we caught the subway north to Harlem and walked a few blocks. It was pretty quiet as it was Sunday morning, but it definitely felt different to the rest of Manhattan. It was a bit more run down with 99¢ shops advertising ATMs supplying $10 notes. There were signs about a gun amnesty, prominent NYPD cameras and a sign of court ordered closure of a restaurant due to supply of minors with alcohol. There were street vendors selling incense sticks, perfume oils and raw African shay butter. The fast food chicken outlets were advertising genuine Southern food including collard greens, catfish, macaroni cheese etc. Some places had a distinct Jamaican twist with jerk chicken, beans and rice etc. There was a guy with a van sporting posters of the Black Panther party, hands off Zimbabwe, and an African nation flag but he was pretty friendly. He explained that the USA was really two nations – a white nation and a black nation. He also told me that Ho Chi Minh had lived in the area and listened to black speakers on that corner in 1916. It could well be true although we thought he lived in Paris before returning to Vietnam?

We got back on the subway and headed further north to Washington Heights and Fort Tryon Park on 190^th Street. Here, overlooking the Hudson River was a European style monastery cloister built with pieces imported from various European monasteries and churches. It was part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the iconic item here was the Unicorn Tapestries. We had seen copies in Stirling Castle in Scotland. The building was very interesting because it was composed of two internal cloisters and two external cloisters. Most of the capitals, gargoyles, stained glass, sculpture, reliquaries, mausoleums, wall hangings, and furniture were from different parts of Europe – Spain, France, England and Germany. The cloisters had a very authentic feel about them - even to the extent of the gardens which were planted in medieval monastery style with herbs and trees and there was even pomegranate in the external cloisters. We worked our way around methodically and left after a jam-packed couple of hours.

We caught the M4 bus from outside and it carried us down Broadway, across the northern side of Central Park and down 5^th Avenue past many museums including the New York Museum, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Ukranian Museum, Neue Galerie and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We jumped off just after this on the southern point of Central Park with the Plaza Hotel and very upmarket stores lining the street. We walked through to the Rockefeller Plaza with its ice rink but the crowds were so large and we were starving for lunch so we took a couple of photos and fled down 5^th Avenue. Eventually we found a diner called Toasties where we had a couple of the best sandwiches we have ever had. We had spicy roast beef and a Cobb with bacon, chicken, lettuce and tomato.

Afterwards we wandered around town with its incredible Christmas shopping crowds and bought a GPS to use with our rental car as it worked out a lot cheaper to buy one. We walked to the Grand Central Terminal which was a terrific building. Outside were massive columns and golden eagles crouching on globes, inside was a cavernous marble hall with the tracks leading off it and the night sky painted on the roof with the various constellations outlined and highlighted. In the entry was a small high quality market and the light fittings hanging off the ceiling carried about 60 electric light bulbs each in an oval configuration. Considering all the dodgy stations we have seen around the world it was remarkably clean. There were still some weird people around including one androgynous individual with hair spiked to a single point a good 30 cms above his head.

We walked back to the Rockefeller Plaza but if anything the crowds were now larger and it was nearly impossible to get to the skating rink. When we did manage to get close it was empty as they were cleaning it so we gave up on the idea of ice-skating. We took a couple of beautiful photos of the surrounds including a huge conifer tree decorated with lights, angels and lights in an adjacent garden bed and a light show of snowflakes playing on the front of the Saks 5^th Avenue building where there was a queue to get in.

We walked across to Hell's Kitchen again and queued up at Totto Ramen on the corner of 52^nd Street and 9^th Avenue. We had to wait a while but it was worth it for the avocado and tuna, and tonkotsu miso ramen. It took us back to Japan immediately – the tiny cramped ramen shop and the perfect ramen soup. We caught the subway home, packed for Washington DC and crashed again after a great week in New York.