It wasn't until we reached Florida that I realized how long it had been since we had travelled anywhere other than to visit family. Admittedly, we were in Stuart Florida for a week in a beach house with family. But it had been a long time since I'd been somewhere new. I could feel my heart lift as we left the house early the first morning. The sun was shining, it was warm (by Canada-in-January standards at least), and we had a new world to explore.
In the end we added about a dozen birds to our life list, and I learned to appreciate small-city-in-nowheresville Florida. There were no particular sights to see within about 2 hours of our house, and all of the really good birding hotspots were about that far away as well. But we saw a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral from the roof, had waves crashing on the beach disturbingly close to our deck, and had natural areas with completely unknown birds and beasts nearby. We saw an 8 foot alligator in a suburban pond, two manatees just off the dock of a restaurant, spent a tantalizing 20 minutes at a nature preserve full of new plants and animals, and ate some of the best fresh fish of my life one evening courtesy of a local fish shop and Harvey's sister.
It actually made me a little sad to be leaving and heading to New York City, even though going to New York afterwards had been entirely my idea. Maybe I'm straying emotionally from being a city girl.
Anyway, on to the point of this post. I wanted to record for posterity what we'd done and seen while we were in New York before I forget the details.
We arrived at JFK after surviving a quick turnaround in Washington DC. Turns out you can manage an inter-terminal transfer and still catch your American Airlines flight with only a 1/2 hour connection time. What we almost didn't manage was figuring out how to navigate the New York transit system to reach downtown after we arrived. I'd read an online description of how to manage things before we arrived, but we had trouble figuring out how to buy our Airtrain ticket and exactly what fare we needed to pay to take the Long Island RailRoad to Penn Station. The transit system operates for the benefit of New Yorkers, not for tourists. The explanations in the stations were not so clear to an outsider. It made me miss guidebooks. New York City is the first major city that I've attempted to navigate without the assistance of a book that explains the basics for tourists.
We made it to our hotel without incident. It was nicer than we expected, and we were upgraded to a suite on checkin. After a quick supper at the closest Shake Shack, we retired for the night. It was almost 9 pm.
Thursday Jan 11: Day 1
I woke up with a head-ache, feeling nauseous. Another migraine. What I really wanted to do was spend the day in bed, but instead I took Advil and the head-buster migraine drugs, and gingerly ventured out of the hotel for the day. We had the first of several entirely unremarkable breakfasts (reluctantly on my part), and then headed to Penn Station to go to the Met.
Half an hour later, we'd managed to figure out how to buy a MetroCard and where to catch the train that we needed. Thank you New York City cops, and thank you random New York Metro employees. Once again, the subway system is not designed for tourists. We didn't even know which direction was "Uptown" or "Downtown", making it difficult to figure out which platform to use to catch the train in the right direction.
Our route to the Met walked us across Central Park: one of the first things we saw was an archway that I've seen in numerous NY movies. We heard a flicker, and saw blue jays as we traversed the park. Despite the way it looms on the map, Central Park is much smaller than I would have expected.
Harv had calculated that the most cost-efficient way for us to visit the Met was to buy a membership, given that there is a discount for out-of-town members, and members can bring one guest along with them free on every visit. It turns out this was the most time-efficient way to visit as well. Members stand in a different and much shorter line for tickets, particularly if they enter via the basement 81st street entrance. This was particularly important when we visited on Sunday.
After getting our memberships squared away, we spent about 1/2 an hour in Egypt. Unfortunately, I still felt pretty fragile so we made our way to the American Wing cafe so that I could sit down. We had overpriced chicken caesar salads, even though it was only about 10:30 am. Helped me feel somewhat better. While we were there I noticed that there was a tour of the Ancient Near East exhibits starting in a few minutes. We rushed to the starting point, but couldn't find the tour. We ended up spending the next couple of hours in the Ancient Assyria, Persia, and associated areas anyway. We looked at pretty much every single artefact. Ancient Egypt had been stuffed with tour groups, but it was peaceful in the ancient near East. It helped my head.
The biggest revelation: probably the cylinder seals. A cylinder seal doesn't look like much by itself. They are carved stone cylinders that average about the size of the first segment of my pinky finger. If you look at the cylinder itself you can see only the indistinct carvings on the side closest to you. The Met has done something clever though: beside each cylinder they display a clay impression so that you can appreciate the image engraved on it. The quality of many of these images is remarkable, as is the fine detail that has been preserved for up to 5000 years. (The oldest cylinder seals we saw dated back to about 3000 BCE.) They were fascinating. Each one would have been used to seal personal letters, adorn clay vessels, serve as a signature or signifier in a largely pre-literate world.
After the ancient near east we visited the special Michelangelo exhibit. I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't been swarmed. There were so many people that it was difficult to see the drawings and sculptures, and impossible to read the interpretative materials that would have made the exhibit cohesive: there were sections on the artists who trained and influenced him, for example, as well as works showing his development as an artist over his lifetime. But with the crowds that we encountered, the most you could do was peer at whichever artwork you could get an obscured view of and try to appreciate it in isolation.
We had tickets to Sleep No More that evening, so we called it a day after about 5 hours at the Met, and took a bus home along 5th Avenue.
I could probably do a whole post on Sleep No More, but you'd probably be better off reading a review or two, or perhaps visiting one of the fan wikis. It was an interesting experience, and I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it more than I would have enjoyed seeing a Broadway Musical.
Day 2: Friday January 12
We went to bed late, but were up and about fairly early. At least, too early to go to MOMA, which was our goal for the day. So we walked in that general direction, stopping in at Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library before hitting the gallery. Best sights: the plaque at Grand Central station honoring Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for working to preserve the station from a threatened mid-70s demolition. Really? They actually considered tearing it down? Staggering. The place is as beautiful and carefully made as any cathedral. Second best sight: wandering into a random room at the New York Public Library and encountering one of the 2 or 3 existing portraits of Mary Wollestonecraft. Who knew it was in New York City? And it's not even in a gallery.
We spent 2 or 3 hours at MOMA afterwards. There were some interesting and famous works there: Starry Night anyone? Or Christina by Andrew Wyatt: which is placed in a hallway where 7/8s of passers-by ignore it because anything placed in a corridor can't be important, can it?. The building itself is interesting, with vertiginous walkways providing peek-a-boo views of various galleries. But overall, I was disappointed. Or perhaps just not in the mood for more modern art.
At any rate, visiting MOMA inspired us to return to the Met after lunch. We caught a bus Uptown, and spent another 4 hours or so going through galleries. We started with 2 or 3 hours in ancient Greece and Rome, then split up so that Harv could go back to Egypt. Me, I needed a break from artefacts. So I sat quietly by the Temple of Dendara reading about Sleep No More for about 1/2 an hour before taking a quick tour through European Impressionism and the David Hockney special exhibition. It was tough meeting Harv though: I allotted 15 minutes to cross the building to rendezvous with him, and needed every second. I kept getting distracted by Tiffany glass, or Islamic art, or Rodin sculptures, or rooms full of Greek artefacts that I hadn't seen yet or wanted to look at again.
Day 3: Saturday January 13
We started the day by standing in line at the Booth theatre just off Times Square, hoping to get rush tickets to see Meteor Shower. Why not do a little celebrity peeping while we were in New York? Meteor Shower was written by Steve Martin and stars Amy Schumer. Sadly, there were only 6 rush seats available for Saturday's performance, and we weren't lucky enough to snag one. We also weren't willing to pay $209 for the cheapest available normal tickets, so we left the theatre and decided to spend our evening elsewhere.
As for the rest of the day, it was time to take a break from museums. Part of my goal in visiting New York had been simply to see it. We visited Tribeca to have pastries at "one of the best bakeries in New York", took the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline, walked down Wall Street and saw the Charging Bull swarmed by tourists. Then I took a quick detour to visit McNalley Jackson (the New York branch of the Saskatoon/Winnipeg chain), before we headed out to one of the "best neighbourhood restaurants" in New York for supper.
Turns out that in a city like New York, random TripAdvisor ratings probably don't mean much, and searching for lists of "Best Restaurants" will lead you to expensive places where you needed to make a reservation weeks in advance. "Best neighbourhood restaurants" helped us find delicious Italian food in the East Village. The East Village was the first neighbourhood that felt like somewhere where I could conceivably live. Not too gentrified, interesting restaurants and stores, people on the streets.
But I think it's a little bit like the Hastings neighbourhoods, where the history of the place is poorer. We passed by the offices/house of the Catholic Worker movement. These radical Catholics work and live with the homeless. Historically they've also been involved in direct action against nuclear weapons facilities. It was kind of thrilling to see them: they're real! They are right there. And I walked by the house where Dorothy Day lived and worked.
It was a little bit like that to attend the
People's Voice Cafe that evening. The performance was undistinguished, as was the venue (a Unitarian Church basement). But the Cafe has been an ongoing event every Saturday night since 1979, hosting progressive folk performers in mid-town New York. I've seen folk music at a New York City coffee house! Most everyone else there knew each other, and you could tell that some of them at least were wondering who we were. It felt a little bit like crashing someone's basement party.
It was sparsely attended, and not surprisingly, they made an announcement calling for support (either via donations or attendance). The ongoing existence of the cafe series is in doubt as the main organizers age and attendance declines. Oddly, it made me feel better about the upcoming demise of People's Coop Books on Commercial: the People's Voice cafe felt less like an institution on the point of extinction, and more like a personal project that was coming to a natural end. Maybe that's how I should look at the loss of People's Coop Books, even though it means that I'll miss encountering it's enlightening and provocative books.
Day 4: Sunday January 14
Sunday was cold and windy, and I started to wonder why I'd book 5 whole days in New York City. Or perhaps, why I hadn't planned more specific museums and sights to see while we were there. I felt ready to go home.
But we headed out early for an undistinguished breakfast in a "hot" spot in Chelsea (there were children there, and everything. Felt like Kits back in the day.), then walked to and through Greenwich village. We passed the Stonewall Inn, the house where Willa Cather wrote My Antonia, Washington Square park, and through the NYU campus. Harv conceived a desire to study Linguistics (Language and the Brain was one of the 7 specialities advertised on a recruiting poster in a window). We were cold, so we took the subway uptown to 59th Street Station. Turns out, that's an answer to the question "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?", other than "practise, practice, practise".
We were, of course, headed back to the Met. You could easily spend a week at the Met, and still only feel that you'd grazed the surface of their collection. This time we walked half the length of Central Park, dodging Sunday joggers, and spotting a Brown Creeper and White-crowned sparrow on our way to the museum.
Sunday's Met highlights included Egypt (again, I know), the Frank Lloyd Wright room, the Tiffany and Art Noveau room, and "pre-Columbian" art. They have an amazing collection of mostly South American gold, as well as a few beautiful pieces from Mexico and Guatemala and the Pacific Northwest. The Central American pieces are all looted. I guess people like the Rockefellers are why looting is such a lucrative enterprise for the locals.
We were done by about 3, so we left and headed to Brooklyn. Actually, we headed first to the New York branch of Le Maison du Chocolate, and then to "one of the best bakeries in New York", which happened to be in Brooklyn. Bien Cuit was good (if not to the standard of Bakery Sate or Beaucoup in its heyday). Parts of Brooklyn looked like Commercial Drive: other parts looked like Calgary (deserted urban downtown), and we ended in Vinegar Hill, which looked a little like a funkier version of Lonsdale. We passed by the local Fluevog store on our way to an excellent cafeteria-style supper at VHH foods. Arguably the best food of our trip.
Day 5: Monday January 15
Here it was, our last morning. Our flight wasn't until 5:30pm, leaving us with most of the day to see more of New York. We took the subway to Greenwich Village to sample some New York bagels (good, but somewhat disappointing compared to their Montreal cousins), walked the High Line (who knew there was a huge driving range on the Hudson River waterfront?), and then took a cross-town train to take a look at United Nations headquarters. Most interesting thing learnt on the tour? That Nordic countries donated and designed the security council chambers, trusteeship council chambers, and the social and economic council chambers. Alas, we were forced to leave the tour early to check out of our hotel before we could learn if Finland had donated the design for the General Assembly chambers.
From the inside, the place looks like a mid-century time capsule. Could be worse: it could have been renovated periodically and be stuck in the 80s.
From there we checked out, had a quick lunch at Pret A Manger, and then left for the airport. Good bye New York City. I may never visit you again, but at least I've satisfied my curiosity for everything except what is in all of those rooms at the Met that we didn't have time to visit.
