Today we did the tourist bit. We are still waking up early, not that a bear needs a lot of sleep. So although it is Sunday by 9.00am we were out of the apartment, it was a lovely morning, sunny and crisp, so we decided to walk along the Hudson to the Subway at Bowling Green. There were lots of joggers around and a group of drummers with a large crowd gathered around in Battery Park. There are several monuments in the park and I was particularly impressed with the one dedicated to the American Merchant Sailors. Another monument was obviously being prepared for un veiling.
Then we saw a monument Maria thought she recognised, except the last time she saw it it was in a different place. For about 30 years there had stood a large bronze globe in the plaza outside World Trade 1 and 2, it stood as a symbol of world peace. On 9/11 it was badly damaged but still recognisable. It has been moved to Battery Park as a temporary memorial to those who died, an eternal flame was lit on September 11th 2002.
We were all particularly moved by some of the mementoes people leave at the memorial.
We took the subway up to Midtown, to 84th Street and then walked over to 5th Avenue to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had heard we were lucky because today was the last day of the Gates in the park. This is an instalation in Cenral Park by an artist and apparently a lot of people had been going to see it.
Well I don’t know about Maria and John but it didn’t do a lot for me. It was colourful but was it art?
Maria and John decided to become friends of the Met, luckily entry is free for those under 12. We spent a very enjoyable couple of hours looking at the exhibition of Ruben’s drawings, they were excellent. Maria always gets depressed after an exhibition like this, along the lines of ‘how come some people are so talented?’
We then decided to take a bus Downtown to Katz. Maria was moaning rather a lot about the amount of walking, the number of stairs and her feet aching. I said she was overdoing the whinging but when she suggested I might like to stop riding in her bag and start walking, I thought it best to keep quiet.
Riding on the bus really made us appreciate the speed of the subway, however you get to see alot more, and in the case of Chinatown smell a lot more. I think we need to go back there and have a really good wander about.
Katzs was great, very busy and lively, we bought lots of pastrami and chopped liver, Maria kept going on about wanting to have what Sally had but I didn’t understand (apparently it’s something to do with a film called When Harry Met Sally)
By now we were all pooped and ready to go back to the apartment. Being a tourist is tiring, still it was all very enjoyable and tomorrow it’s back to the real world, work and the laundry.