the adventures of pinkaholic girl

New York, New York

New York has a lot more quirks than other places I've visited so far. Catching a taxi here is like playing grand theft auto. They dodge and weave other cars & taxis as if they're stationery objects. Which they're not. You can't really be worried about a serious accident though, because Manhattan traffic never gets higher than 30km/h.

Today was super busy. We had an "early" night last night (2am) so we could wake up sometime before 9am today. Tina and Aruna were out till very late - as in, they came back to the hostel to look up the address of a club at 2am then went out again. I do not know how they do it, and I feel old and tired just thinking about it.

Central park was very pretty. We walked from Columbus Circle on 60th to the Great Lawn, through Shakespeare's Garden, The Mall, The Literary Walk, Belvedere Castle and Strawberry fields. (You can look all these locations up on the website.) The lack of signage in the park makes it difficult to navigate, but it was still very peaceful compared to the incessant horn honking in the streets. I really liked Belvedere Castle - tiny and charming.

Afterwards we hit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which I really enjoyed. It's a good size gallery - not too overwhelming like some galleries in Europe with multiple lines of pictures on each wall. There's a lot of famous artworks by Matisse, Cezanne, Dali, Magritte, Van Gogh, Warhol, etc which made it fun for me, because I'm a bit of a candy art person. I don't read much into the subtext, but there are free audioguides provided if you're into that kind of stuff. This is about the acutal size of The Persistence of Memory. It's tiny. They let you take photographs inside the gallery, which earns them a big plus. There's also an outdoor sculpture garden which is a nice sancturary for weary feet after a visit.

The gift shop in MoMA is AWESOME. They sell lots of beautiful, quirky and unusual gifts but most of it is too large to carry in luggage :(

After MoMA, we caught the subway downtown to SoHo/the village and wandered around for a bit. We visited the Dean & Deluca mothership store (aka where Felicity worked - you can even buy t-shirts and mugs here) which had the most delicious array of cakes and pastries on display, and a million other gourmet offerings. I coveted. The problem was that both Alison and I had literally no money, so we couldn't buy much. In hindsight that was probably a good thing...

We ate dinner at a Ukranian restaurant and felt way too full afterwards.

I haven't yet achieved my goal of eating a giant pretzel in New York. I think tomorrow's my last chance.

posted by d @ 2:00 pm