New York’s subway will take you anywhere fairly quickly, but the view down there isn’t nearly as good as from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Our Brooklyn pad is less than 3 km from the bridge. The weather was fine and a bit warmer, so perfect for a walk over to Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. We found another cafe near the bridge which was very proud of having once been visited by Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, and their coffee was ok too. The pedestrian level of the bridge is on top, so not only do you get a great view, but it’s quite peaceful up there… until a cyclist yells at you for walking in the bike lane. Fair enough – I’m a cyclist too, and I often try to ‘educate’ pedestrians at home – but this was unfamiliar territory, so… sorry!
We wandered around central Manhattan, visited a huge camera store, and gradually made our way up towards Central Park, which treated us with the colours of late autumn, and a slight mist to soften the view. Not far into the park is the Wollman ice rink, which Dom was itching to skate on. I have a still-healing broken wrist, and Ced has a dodgy knee at the moment, otherwise we might have joined in, but Dom went out alone, with a couple of hundred others, and had a great time. We couldn’t get very close to the edge, so we tried our best to make hand signals to get her to stop for a photo – you can just see a bit of a purplish blur in our pics.
After Dom’s ice fun (and our vicarious ice fun), we headed back into highrise-ville, and happened upon The Original Soup Man – one of a franchise chain of soup bars which spawned from the soup kitchen run by the guy who inspired the Soup Nazi character on Seinfeld. They have a cardboard cutout of him in the front window, and there’s no mention of the N word, but he’s got a very serious-looking face on, and they’ve held on to the list of rules which were trumpeted in the TV show: make your order, pick up your soup, move to the EXTREME left… but now with ‘Enjoy your soup’ added to the list. It was a pretty healthy meal: soup, a breadroll and a piece of fresh fruit of your choice. Actually, I’ve been very impressed with the food in New York overall, considering the stereotype of American food mostly being prefabricated, processed poo drowned in dressings - there’s a lot of healthy choices here.
To get a great view of New York City you really should go up the top of one of the taller buildings. A lot of people go to the Empire State Building, but Ced suggested we go up the Rockerfeller Centre, so we can SEE the Empire State building in our view. Good plan – the Empire State was lit in green and red for Thanksgiving and made a great centre-piece in the sea of lights below.
We headed back to Times Square, which was pumping, and much more enjoyable than our first rainy night there. We checked out the huge Toys’R'Us store, which with its big displays, animatronics and even its own ferris wheel, was more like a theme park than a shop.
Next day we returned to Manhattan again, but further south this time, to wander through the streets of Soho and Greenwich Village. Soho is filled with colourful shops, awnings and banners, with artwork for sale on the streets and the sound of buskers echoing around. Here Dom found the same shop which had its tentacles around her in Hawaii, but here the same tokidoki bags were more than $50 cheaper, so that was too good to pass up, and Avril bought one too. Ced geeked out out in the Kid Robot shop. My favourite was Evolution - a shop with fossils, skeletons, insect specimens, stuffed animals etc – way cooler than any museum shop I’ve ever seen.
Before long it was dark and we were in Washington Square, which was pretty quiet except for a small group of musicians experimenting with sounds under the arch. But shops were still open so we looked at clothes and hats for a while longer and ate in a very dark mexican restaurant. All shopped out, we returned to Brooklyn.
This morning we checked out a bit more of Brooklyn and then back to Manhattan, which is far too big to see everything in five days. But we filled in a few gaps – walked up Madison Avenue, photographed a few more buildings, walked a bit deeper into Central Park while there was still light, and then visited the Guggenheim Museum. The famous exterior of the building was mostly covered with scaffolding, which dampened our approach, but it was still open. With only 45 minutes before closing though, we didn’t try to race around and see all the exhibits, but rather checked out the amazing curved atrium and had a drink in their cafe.
It’s only been four days, but a pretty good introduction to New York. Kim and Damien returned from their Canadian skiing trip tonight and Kim was sporting a cast on her broken wrist after a fall while snowboarding. I’ve just started taking off my splint as it feels like it’s mostly healed – sorry to transfer the pain to you Kim! We stayed up late, swapping stories, then with Kim and Damien back in their bedroom, the other four of us are crammed into the floor of other room. Dom and I are off to Costa Rica tomorrow, so thanks for a great show New York, New York!
