I heart New York

We finally made it to New York City. I had been there when I was sixteen but we spent our days in Queens at the World's Fair. So at our advanced ages, it was quite exciting to see all this stuff for the first time. We've seen so many movies about New York the places we visited seemed like old friends. And it made it even more special to see it at Christmastime.

We took the bus (which was easy) and spent the day in Manhattan on Saturday. I have bronchitis (not pneumonia) and am on antibiotics now so the trip wasn't quite as fun as it would have been if I had been well. But we had such a good time. That's me in front of Central Park right by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We mostly just walked around all day even though it was bitterly cold and windy. We did spend a few hours in the museum but I finally had to leave. There were so many paintings I had been waiting a lifetime to see that I was getting jaded. I didn't want to spoil my first impressions of the rest of them. I cried when I stood in front of that Christmas tree with the Neapolitan angels. They had music playing and the lighting on the angels was magical. I don't think I've seen many more beautiful sights in my life. We saw one of my favorite Ingres paintings (the lady in the blue dress) and two Vigee Lebrun's! Michael and I got to see lots of Degas, Renoir, Manet, Monet and Van Gogh paintings. We know that we missed tons and tons of stuff so that will be something to look forward to for our next trip.

New Yorkers were so extremely nice to us. We were astounded. One man came up to us and asked us if we needed help just because we looked confused. We asked him which way was east and he showed us and then he was off. One lady in the subway came out of her booth and talked to us for fully five minutes about what we should see and do. Incredible. People said "excuse me" and offered assistance. Not at all what we expected. We found the subways to be not half as intuitive (or as frequent) as the Metro trains in Paris. But because Manhattan is a big rock, the subway trains are not far below the surface the way they are in London or Paris. It's very easy to use a credit card and buy a one-day pass to the subway.

We walked into several hotel lobbies (which we don't ordinarily do but we weren't the only ones being touristy in New York). We saw the painting of Eloise in the Plaza. Facing the Plaza, the line to get into FAO Schwartz was halfway around the block and snaked back around itself. The Apple store also faces the Plaza and it's in a big glass box sunk into the ground. Pretty cool. We did go into Toys R Us where they had a giant ferris wheel you could ride in the foyer.

Bloomingdale's windows were awesome. They had decorated the windows to go along with a Tony Bennett CD they were selling inside. So the windows with moving characters depicted scenes from the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. One window looked just like my Alice and Jerry reader. The Bergdorf Goodman windows were strange. Many of them were all white and they were fantasies. Ladies dressed in gorgeous gowns (one window had a man mannequin with a fox head instead of a human one) with white geese and odd and random items painted white. Bizarre. We were surprised that the Chanel, Dior and other very expensive boutiques were very understated. They didn't look Christmasy at all. Trump Tower was lit up like crazy. One building was covered with lights which made it look like a giant present with bow.

We saw kids sledding in Central Park, very rich ladies walking out of Chanel and Dior boutiques, hot dog stands, fancy apartment buildings with doormen (the only buildings with no ice on the sidewalks. It's evidently no one's job in New York to clear the sidewalks so we slogged around in slush all day even though it didn't snow a bit. Just left over stuff from the day before.)Michael spotted an 80,000 dollar car. We saw art deco stuff in gorgeous architectural details especially around Rockefeller Center.

We had almost no disappointments. The only thing that wasn't as wonderful as I expected was the skating rink in front of the Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center. It was about half the size I thought it would be. (It was about the size of the Galleria rink in Dallas.) Other than that, it was wonderful. To see so many buildings, company names, stores and landmarks all so close together was like working a jigsaw puzzle. Oh, that store goes there, right next to that park! Perhaps it was best that we came to it after a lifetime of reading books, seeing movies and learning about New York City. Every block had something that rang a bell. Sadly, even though we didn't get near Wall Street, we walked past an awful lot of financial institutions whose names have been in the news a lot lately. You can see how people with tons of money in a city that sophisticated could lose sight of what's real or important. Their greed just fed on everyone else's greed.

I'm anxious to go back but I think it will be nicer in the spring.