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We arrived in NY NY at 1:30pm Saturday 26th June via JFK airport and had an abrupt introduction to traffic at it's worst. JFK is only 30k from Manhattan but the trip to our hotel took 3 hours!!! It was amazing and I think the only road rule is 'don't stop'!
The Quality Hotel on Broadway is a misnomer - aka is there is NO quality. (Robyn don't be offended, just don't recommend it to anyone else). Two nights later we checked into the HI hostel 10 blocks North on Amsterdam Avenue. It was very clean and comfortable, just lacked a kitchen for us to prepare meals. So we ate out for every meal, mostly Sushi and fruit.
Day 2, Sunday was brunch and some fine Jazz at the Blue Note restaurant and jazz bar in lower manhattan. The performance was a tribute to Louis Armstrong and the soloist on brass 'blue' our heads off. His music making was damn fine. (The lunch was very ordinary but we didn't care).
The tour of the city sites began on Monday with The Museum of Natural History. This is a must see for anyone travelling to NY. It covers an area of 6
city blocks and 4 floors of enviable collections. The Dinosaur collection is huge(haha) and very well layed out - see attached photos. The mammal collection equally as impressive. The middle levels had collections of Incan, Mayan and Aztec civilisations. A huge range of preserved golden artifacts saved from the Spanish invaders. The jewelery was very ornate for it's time and certainly much more developed compared to the relics from Pompeii we saw in Ottowa. They also have an enormous planetarium, The Hayden, and the sphere is 27m across in a 9 story glass solarium. We watched the 3D projection inside the sphere showing the visible universe (as we now know it with all our current generation telescopes, including Hubble). It was amazing and again worth the entry fee. Grant, if you are taking the family to the USA you must go.
Day 4 we saw a little art of sorts. We cut around Central Park to the Guggenheim Museum. I am not one for the modern stuff but this gallery had plenty of it. The building itself is of spiral construction but in a bad state of repair (and there was plenty of scaffolding holding it up). The primary display
was from a German woman who built the gallery (and whose name we have forgotten, sorry Barb) and it was post impressionist with alot of geometric designs. We did like a few of her works.
(Her name is Hilla Rebay. She was artisitic-advisor who along with Solomon Guggenheim were the inspiration for the Frank Lloyd Wright design we have today. By the way, Lloyd-Wright didn't live to see the building completed . We did not like some of her contempories however and did a quick 'spiral' thru the 6 floors. From here we crossed the street to the Metropolitan Art Museum. Again this was well worth the visit and the $20 'donation'. It is only 3 floors but a maze of rooms (we got lost and separated a number of times). We were pushed for time and had to look at some of the collections separately to maximise our time. We should have allowed 10 hrs instead of 5. The collections included Renaissance works from Giotti, Delsarto, Bronzino and others, many famous portraits by Rembrandt, and alot of great still lifes from other Dutch and Flemish artists. This was all one floor. The musical instruments dated back to ancient
times and included an excellent assortment of keyboard instruments. The armour, swords and pistols from Ottoman Empire, Persian, Japanese and European medieval times was extremely impressive. I have no idea how they even moved in the armour and the poor horses would have died from exhaustion due to the weight. They have temples and displays from the Baroque period and Eygyptian temples from Luxor. There was plenty more but we can tell you later. That night we went to the Lincoln Art Centre (Avery Fisher Hall) for a concert by the Park Avenue Chamber Orchestra, an amateur group celebrating their fifth anniversary. All funds raised from their concerts go to a 'hand up' program for developing junior talents in poorer areas of Manhattan and greater NY. They performed the Post Horn Serenade Overture of Mozart followed by his Clarinet concerto. This was performed brilliantly by the young artist (whose name we can't recall). This piece goes for nearly 45min and is extremely intense. After the intermission we witnessed a wonderful performance of Mozart's Requiem with a 100 member choir. Inspite of the fact that only the first 5 minutes of this hour long work is actually composed by Mozart, it
is an awesome musical experience. We got goose-bumps. We bravely took the subway home around midnight.
Day 5 we returned to the hall at 0945 to hear the NY Philharmonic Orchestra perform a full rehearsal for their season finale. The program was Mahlers sixth symphony with a 110 piece orchestra, including 2 harps, alpine horn, cow bells and a massive wooden 'sledge hammer and drum' for the dramatic finale. It was brilliant and worth the $15 we paid to get in. It was then onto another art museum, The Museum of Modern Art. Again this was not our thing so we stayed only on hour or so.
(However, we did like the few art pieces of one Georges Seurat, founder of the Neo-impressionist school. His technique involved portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours. This became known as Pointillism. He created huge compositions with tiny detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work, but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Here endeth the lesson!! We look forward to seeing more of his work when we arrive in Europe. We spent the afternoon at the cinema watching MR
and MRS Smith - highly recommend this film.
Day 6 we toured an aircraft carrier, Intrepid, now a museum of alsorts of war nonsense. It was used in WWII and suffered prolonged kamikazi attacks from the Japs which nearly sank the ship. It later became a rescue boat for the astronauts that overshot their landing in the Gemini program of space exploration. This was Craigs domain not mine so I sat on one of the decks in the sun for a while as he looked around. There were many old bombers(F16, F11, Tomcat, Mig21 and Blackbird) and choppers and even the now defunct Concorde. There was also a nuclear sub that we did not tour.
That night we took a 2hr cruise around the Hudson River and East River under the Brooklyn, William and Manhattan bridges, past Ellis Island and Statue of Liberty. It was very enjoyable and the running commentary very entertaining and informative.
Unfortunately we did not get to any Broadway productions
(we'll make up for it by going to a couple of musicals in the West End London - namely Phantom and Les Mis.) and did not climb the 80 odd floors Empire State Building. The
smog reduced visibility to 1 mile so we could not be bothered to cue for 1.5 hours to see nothing.
The lasting (bad) memories of NY - the stench of the putrìfying garbage piled up on the pavements outside the restaurants and shops; the stench of urine in the subways; and the damn rude Yanks!
The good bits we descibed above but forgot to mention the Steinway Hall we stumbled across on the last day on 53rd St. Craig was like a kid in a candy store, not knowing which one to play on first, so had to try every single one! We have adjusted the housing loan to accomodate the $250,000 USD crystal inlayed full size B Grand Piano. We now just need a house big enough to fit.
So now we have left the west behind and headed off to the Old Country and Europe.
Stay tuned for the highlight of the trip so far - Italy
and the Foooood!!!!.
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