Weekend in New York

Friday I went to work in the morning and worked on my next article spread about the STS-103 Discovery mission. I worked really hard because I left at lunch to meet up with my Canadian friend, Erin, because we were off to New York! We had lunch in Union Station before catching the Bolt Bus at 2:30. The bus was supposed to get in at 6:45, but there was a fair amount of traffic the closer we got to New York, so we didn't get there until 8:00ish. We were dropped off at 34th Street and 8th near Penn Station and we had to get to 38th West and 88th Street. We got on the subway quite sleepy and excited and successfully got to the hostel without a problem. We stayed at the International Student Center and shared a room with five other girls. After we dropped off some of our stuff we were just a little hungry. We went over one block and wandered down Columbus which had a lot of restaurants and pubs.We ended up in this cafe thing called Gastronomie 491. We had awesome strawberry smoothies and a quinoa salad and a tasty chickpea and tomato salad. After we headed back to the hostel and I crashed as soon as my head hit the pillow!

Our room

View from the window

The following morning, Saturday, we woke up bright and early! I tried to be less grumpy then normal because I didn't want Erin to abandon me! We wanted the diner experience for breakfast, so we wandered around for half-an-hour before we gave up and used my handy dandy smart phone my American aunt and uncle lent me. We ended up in a diner called the Amsterdam Diner on Amsterdam and 81 Street. The only thing missing was two cops eating breakfast. I had strawberry and cream cheese between two slices of french toast and it was pretty yummy! Truthfully I think I would have ate anything! The next thing on our list was the Metropolitan Museum. We tried walking through Central Park, but they had part of it blocked off for a charity concert that was happening later that night, so we walked on the sidewalk next to the road that goes between two parts of the park. There was a high wall in the way, so we couldn't see into the park. It was still quite pretty and everything was so green! I would live there just for the greenest of the place!

We finally got to the Met about 10:15. We realized that we didn't have enough time to go through the whole thing. That place is so big it could house a village! We decided to start off by doing a highlights tour. The highlights tour took us through most of the museum in an hour and the guide talked about eight objects. The tour started off with a fresco from Pompeii and ended with a temple from Egypt. In between there was a statue from the Baroque period, a tapestry, a modern African art piece, a Baroque painting, a drum from the Pacific Islands and a statue from a Hindu Temple. I think that's it. It was hard to stay focused and with the tour because there were so many cool things to look at and get distracted by. Some how we made it through. After the tour instead of staying in the Met we decided to go to the Cloisters and come back to the museum later because it was open until 9pm. 

The Cloisters are in Northern Manhattan, so we had to hope on the subway again. To get to the right line we found an entrance into Central Park and trekked up to the North West corner. Central Park is so pretty! I could spend a whole day there instead of just passing through. There is so much stuff to do in that one park, but it's really huge in order to accommodate it all. 

We left the Met about 11:45 and got to the Cloisters about 1:00. We mostly went there for the architecture and the gardens. Most of the things inside the Cloisters we religious paintings or statues from the Medieval Ages. The Cloisters was actually made out of different parts of other cloisters from Europe. Most of the parts originate from France. Some columns come from 12th Century cloisters. The building is really amazing, but a little weird because some times all the bits and pieces don't really fit together that well. Now a days building something like this would probably be frowned upon, but the Cloisters were put together and opened to the public in 1938. I really liked the stain glass windows. Some of them were so impressive and intricate. I also liked the vaulted ceilings and the gardens! On the way into the Cloisters there was what looked like to be a giant groundhog! I don't know what it was, so if anyone could tell me I would like to know! This animal really fascinated me for some reason. I don't know why, but it did!

Name that animal!

We headed back to the Met about 2:30 and got lost on our way back to the subway from the Cloisters. So we didn't get to the subway until half an hour later! This time we took the subway down to the south west corner and walked over to the Met. We arrived at the Met 4ish and started through our chosen galleries. We only chose to go through parts of the museum because we didn't have enough time or energy to do the whole thing. We went back to the Egyptian exhibit and saw the Temple again. That was followed by the Arms and Armor. On our way to the next exhibits we went through half of the Musical Instruments. Then there was Photography and a special exhibit on punk clothing. Finally we did the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. We did all that in four hours and by the time we were finished our feet hurt, our backs hurt and we were exhausted but happy. However, it wasn't done yet. Erin wanted to see the museums J. M. W. Turner paintings, but they were closed off because there wasn't enough security to go around, so we stuck around for the 8:15 tour/lecture on the Turners. The lecture had two parts, the first about the three Turner paintings and the second about his influence on others. We just stayed for the first half before we had enough.

The museum mayhem was followed by us wandering back across Central Park to this pub called the Dead Poet. All of this pub's signature drinks are named after dead poets! I had the Richard Frost and Erin had the Emily Dickinson. I actually liked this alcoholic drink which surprised me. It might have been because it tasted like pink lemonade and didn't burn on the way down. I also had a four cheese grilled cheese which was yummy, but I think I would have liked anything after our long day! The walls had quotes from poets on them and it was just a really cool small pub!

   

By the time we were asleep at 11:30 none of our roommates were back yet. The next morning we got up at 8 am again. This time we were both tired and a little grumpy. I was tired enough and sick with a cold that I fell down the stairs. The stairs in this hostel were not level and I wasn't coordinated enough to make it down them. I now have a bruise across my wrist from where it hit the handrail.  After we got out of the hostel we went and got tea and bagels at a nearby coffee shop and then headed towards Times Square via Central Park. While meandering through Central Park we came across this really interesting photographer. This guy takes panorama photographs and turns them into circles. I bought one of his pictures of the Lower East Side. I'll put a picture of his business car beneath for people to see. Times Square wan't impressive at all! It was overcrowded, quite small and not even a square!

The last thing we wanted to do was go shopping! Erin had done some research and determined that the SoHo district might be our best chance. After wandering through a couple of stores with no luck we ended up in this store called White House/Black Market. The customer service people were so nice! I've never experienced anything like it! The lady who helped us pretty much got us to try on every dress in the store without us feeling like she was being pushy. It was fun to play dress up and this is coming from a girl who pretty much hates shopping. In the end we both ended up with two dresses. I got a red lace dress and a white dress with pink and black flowers and Erin got a black dress and also got a red dress. It was a lot of fun, but after we felt really broke and I still feel broke! We still had almost three hours to kill before our 5:30 bus, so we headed back to our favorite place, Central Park. We sat next to a pond for an hour and a half and ate frozen treats. Erin had a strawberry Popsicle and I had a snow cone. It was almost the best part of the trip! The weather was nice and we were in the shade and not getting to hot! The only thing was this homeless man came up to us and tried to sell us some of the poetry he wrote. He stood there for ten minutes just talking to us and we were both to polite to tell him we weren't interested. When he learned that we didn't have any cash on us he promptly departed thanking us the whole time for listening to him. He seemed like a nice guy, but it was still weird.

We headed off towards the bus about four because we wanted to pick up something to eat on the bus and make sure we get there early enough we weren't running to catch it! We ended up getting food at Le Pain Quotidian. We both had an open faced black bean hummus sandwich with avocados and tomatoes and a giant Belgium brownie. We got it to go and ate most of it on the bus ride home.  We both saved half of our brownie for later because we were getting chocolate sick. When we were headed to the bus we knew what street it was on and arrived twenty minutes early, but there was no one around! Also, there was no way the bus could pick us up because it was a one way street and we were on the wrong side. After a couple of minutes I went and checked around the corner and to our relief there was a sign and a long line of people waiting for the bus. We were lucky enough to arrive early enough so that we could still find seats next to each other on the bus. On the way back to DC we talked about everything from our favorite fairy tales/folklore stories to Say Yes to the Dress and Weddings. All in all it was a great weekend and when I have more time I would like to go back.