Raccoons in Central Park test positive for RABIES

New York In A Nutshell (albeit a shell for a really big nut)

The plan was to wake up awfully early on monday morning to start our 11 or so hour drive from Ohio to New York. The waking up early part went to plan but there was a thunderstorm raging outside with warnings of flash floods etc so we went back to sleep for a bit. Got on the road at about 9am when things had dried out.

Drove and drove and drove through, and stopped briefly in, several states - West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey - watching the landscape (and weather and traffic) change before we crossed the quite beautiful Verrazano-Narrows bridge and made it at last to New York aka The Concrete Jungle bka The Big Apple. Or more specifically one of the five boroughs - Brooklyn. There we were met by Kuem's sister-in-law and a veritable feast of korean food before we crashed.

Tuesday
It was looking like rain so where best to go but the beach! Top of Kuem's NY to-do list was Coney Island so the four of us caught the train down there, got wet, took a couple of photos and got back on the train. Was a shame really as it would've been lovely in less inclement weather and to see the fairground there going. Was kinda cool seeing it completely empty and ghostly though.
Stayed on the train/subway all the way to Manhattan, getting off right opposite the giant Macy's store. Raced across the road in the now full-on downpour and into the biggest shop in the world (or so Macy's says). Shopped for a bit, Kuem bought me a gorgeous dress lucky me, then walked the half a dozen blocks to her sister's shop/laundromat (thankfully the rain had all but stopped by then). She took us for lunch at a Chipotle round the corner, a chain that does good burritos, then Jon and I headed off on our own and spent the rest of the afternoon making our way up 5th avenue as far as Central Park.
Stopped in at various places as we felt the need for some AC mainly, including the Trump Tower lobby, Saks Fifth Avenue and the Apple store which was quite an experience. I'm sure it was actually less chaotic than it seemed. Got a street food snack (a hotdog, a knish and a snapple) then caught the subway back to Brooklyn.

Wednesday
During the day we mostly hung out around the southern end of Manhattan. Walked around the Wall St area then over to where the twin towers once were. Currently it's a huge building site, the first memorial tower (tower one i think is the very original name for it) is making progress. There were some banners with artistic renderings of what it might look like in the future.
Found some bagels with plenty of cream cheese to devour sitting on the waterfront with a view of Lady Liberty and New Jersey. Not long after that it started to rain so we headed indoors to Century 21 - a giant, outlet style store that sells designer goods for really, unbelievably cheap prices. You may have heard about it on Queer Eye! Mostly it was mayhem. But we scored a couple of good bargains (more about that in tomorrow's edition) and headed back to brooklyn for a feed of Israeli falafel heros (basically a sub, not quite what we expected).
Drove over to Hoboken, NJ to see Electric Six (!!!) play in the back room of Maxwell's bar & grill. The entrance stamps used invisible ink that glowed under UV light. It was awesome (the whole thing, not just the stamps). Gay Bar was an obvious highlight. The lead guy was a star, actually they all were. The set list was divided into trilogies - the KILL trilogy, the gay trilogy, the dance trilogy etc. Yep.
On our way home we decided to stop by Times Square and I'm so glad we did. To see it for the first time lit up in all its glory was the best. Daylight just doesn't do the place justice at all.

Thursday
We headed to Battery Park at the very south of Manhattan for a better view of Liberty Island. Had briefly considered getting the ferry over there but heard someone say to the people already waiting that they were looking at about a 2 hour wait, hour and 3/4 at best, in the scorching heat no less, which didn't quite seem worth it. So we watched some street performers for a bit and made a rough count of the suckers waiting (about 1000) then had to head back to Century 21 as for some strange reason they only have womens fitting rooms so Jon had some things to return once he'd tried them on at home.
Went and ate a late lunch sitting in Central Park, watching community league softball and a very cute squirrel. Walked around in Central Park a little bit, eating ice-cream as we went.
In the evening we drove over to Queens to visit Jon's cousin Scott's Dad's fruit and vege shop before going for dinner at his sister's korean restaurant, where the food just kept coming. Stopped by the two grocery stores in Brooklyn as well on the way back.

Friday
We'd arranged at dinner to meet up with Scott's sister Hyun Hee (aka Hunny) but that got postponed an hour or so, so we used that time to go to the outskirts of Little Italy where Rainbow Sandals can be found and both got some, yay! (although the impending blisters were not so yay). Then we went back to Union Square, found Hunny and she took us to a thai place nearby for a delicious lunch accompanied by a pitcher of black cherry caipirinha. The place was big but was still packed for the lunch rush. The artwork tried to make noodles look sexy, and sort of succeeded.
After lunch it was way too hot to try to do anything so we hung out in a shady spot in Union Square for a fair chunk of the afternoon before we had to go our separate ways. Our way was to go line up for over an hour for the ferry to Governer's Island and the free concert there with Caribou! They were fantastic (and had gorgeous visuals to accompany the music), as were the band before them, Phantagram. It was held at "The (man-made) Beach" complete with sand, lined with colourful plastic palm trees and the best view of downtown Manhattan which just got better as night fell after a fiery sunset. I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.

Saturday
Did possibly the most touristy thing yet and went up the Empire State Building for a view of the concrete jungle. We even looked at a couple of things through the big binoculars (super zoom!). Heard some Finnish being spoken for the first time - must have heard just about every other language besides that on the subway, and everywhere you go in New York for that matter. Overheard a guy the night before saying that something like 800 languages are spoken in the five boroughs, which is easy to believe.
For lunch we went to Little Italy proper (and Chinatown as it seems to be swallowing Little Italy up from every side) where there are a couple of blocks lined with restaurants that are pedestrian only. Got pizza by the slice from a couple of different places as we wandered around.
Had planned to catch the subway straight to Central Park but as we were going past Grand Central we decided to get off there to check it out. Incredible. It is so vast and the ceiling with representations of the different signs of the zodiac racing across it makes it seem almost as big as the sky. Something was being filmed at the time too, no idea what though.
From Grand Central Station we did a little walking tour first to the Library and Bryant Park (even the rubbish bins look fashionable) then on to Rockefeller Center with Radio City, the GE building and the place that would be an ice rink in winter. Caught the subway onto Central Park, getting off further towards the north end of the park where we met a friendly policeman come tour guide with a true New Yorker accent (love it!). Walked around the reservoir (jogger central, just like in Dunedin) and enjoyed sunset lying on the Great Lawn (Grandad wishes he could ever get his grass in that perfect a condition). Saw the Belvedere Castle, with a backstage view into the Delacorte Theatre below where someone was dying very loudly in a shakespearean manner, the Bethesda Fountain, where beautiful music was emanating from beneath the terrace, and Strawberry Fields on our way out. Caught a yellow NYC Taxi back to Columbus Circle and were about to head home but I was craving a giant pretzel. Couldn't find any street vendors that late at night but instead wound up at the Brooklyn Diner where we sat in seats that the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Susan Sarandon and Bill Paxton had once occupied (along with many others whose names we didn't recognise) and dined on gourmet onion rings and potato chips with melted gorgonzola, an ice cream float and a Vanilla 16 oz Brooklyn Egg Creme before making our way back to Brooklyn.

Sunday
We had planned on going to see the Yankees play at Yankee Stadium this afternoon, but when we tried to get tickets the cheapest seats left were $300 a pop! So instead we met up with Kuem's sister again and her daughter Lydia and had lunch in Koreatown then Jon, Lydia and I headed to Times Square and decided on impulse to visit Madame Tussaud's which was a lot of fun, especially the 4D Wizard of Oz movie (very much abbreviated). Emerged some time and many many photo op's later (so many the batteries nearly died) and returned Lydia to her mum's shop.
Went to check out the kind of sparse Hell's Kitchen flea market just before they packed up (lots of cool antique and vintage stuff as well as the more run of the mill stalls) then explored a bit of Chelsea, walking along the High Line - an old elevated freight train track that is being turned into a park, around the Chelsea Piers which are where the Titanic would have docked, had it ever made it that far, and is now a recreation area with a driving range on one pier and parks on others that provided a perfect sunset spot. Then through the lovely neighbourhoods of Greenwich village with their leafy, narrow, cobblestone streets and out at Washington Park and the Washington Arch.

Monday
Was supposed to be the day we drove back to Ohio but our trip got extended a day so we could go to a museum finally. Too many to choose from but decided on the Guggenheim. Kuem came too and we spent several hours making our way up the ramp. The main exhibition on was Haunted, which began with Andy Warhol's Orange Disaster and finished up the top of the spiral with a whole "floor" devoted to life size projections of a performance of John Cage's 4'33".
Kuem got us lunch (including a tuna melt - had to be done) which we ate in Central Park near the Metropolitan then she headed off exploring and we went and lay on the lawn again until it cooled off a little. Made a quick visit to the foyer of the Natural History Museum just before they closed (big dinosaur skeletons, but not a T-Rex) before walking out through the south of Central Park (tried to find Jimmy Choo on 5th Avenue but it wasn't at the address google said to go to) and getting the subway to Bryant Park to find a spot for the outdoor movie that was showing at sunset, The China Syndrome. It was pretty packed already when we got there, a good hour or so before it was even due to begin, but there was room enough for two more and we had a great view of Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas fighting to expose nuclear power for the menace it is! It started pouring part way through which cleared a lot of the crowd out, but we huddled under our umbrella (which actually started leaking!) and waited it out, for all the 5 minutes that it lasted, to finish the film. Stopped to get a giant pretzel, which turned out to be too salty to eat sadly, before our last New York Subway Ride.


Misc:
Subway love
Taxis everywhere (new style though, not reminiscent of the movies at all)
Languags all around, changing every moment, spanish, yiddish, chinese, portuguese... even Kuem and her sister-in-law chatting away like school girls in Korean
Hot hot heat - though thankfully not as hot as the week before
Sooo much walking
Top toilets: Bryant Park, by far and away. Install some A/C and they'd be hard to beat anywhere
(Not-even-fit-for-a-)Bottom toilets: next to Delacorte Theater in Central Park, although the building from the outside gets an A.