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Published: October 4th 2010
Just a few days in New York again before we fly out to London. As its prefectly safe to use the subway at night, we head downtown and check out a couple of well known suburbs. We wander through Chinatown with its shops and street stalls selling all sorts of Asian style goods and have a lovely pasta dinner at a restaurant in Little Italy. And we have to hit the bright lights of Times Square at night, with all the other tourists. The evenings are really warm and its a great atmosphere. Its definately the centre of consumerism with huge billboards like enormous TV screens advertising all sorts of things, each covering many stories of buildings.
We're keen to go to the American Museum of Natural History, and a recce visit highlights the need for a good chunk of a day to be donated to the cause. A generous New Yorker gives us free tickets to all the exhibitions for the next day, which is fantastic. We celebrate by heading into Central Park to check out some more of that huge area. Great idea, but the weather has to have its say - a thunder storm arrives and the
Watch out Keith!
American Museum of Natural Historyrain is so heavy that the trees don't provide much cover. We make a run for the subway, and rush underground to shelter. We arrive at our platform absolutely soaked to the bone and step onto our train ("stand clear of the closing doors"). In the silence we realise we're getting furtive glances from everyone else (dry) in the carriage as the rivers of water run off us and create pools at our feet!
Just as we're wondering what we'll have for dinner, we find it's free pizza night at our hostel. Perfect! We congratulate ourselves again on our choice of accommodation, eat way more than our share and head off to bed early for a big day tomorrow.
Next morning its off to the Museum of Natural History early in the day to make the most of it. Our tickets are the deluxe versions, allowing us entry into the general exhibitions as well as most of the special exhibitions, and its such a huge place that we check out the map of the 5 floors to make a plan of attack. The museum covers everything from space and geology through to human origins and culture, biodiversity, ocean
life, forests, birds, mammals, and (most importantly) reptiles and amphibians. We have to prioritise to make sure we see our favourites.
The special exhibitions include one on the Silk Road and one on the race to the South Pole between Scott and Amundsen. The race to the pole one is really well designed following a timeline that compares the two teams preparation, crucial decisions and progress at various stages. They even have on display the actual overshoes worn by Captain Scott. We also see a great show in the Planetarium, set up like a space bubble with spiraling ramps in the foyer.
The day involves a bit too much running between exhibitions, but we can't really complain about having too many interesting things to see! There are lots of enormous skeletons of dinosaurs and skeletons and scale models of all sorts of weird and wonderful ancient and modern creatures through their evolution and many informative displays on the fossil finds around the world that have led to today's knowledge of these creatures. Like our visit to MOMA, we leave feeling like we haven't really done it justice, but we're happy that we've seen some very cool natural history
Random fountain
And random schoolgirls stuff.
On our final outing we all get well overdue haircuts, Tessa's from a woman called Apple - perfectly New York. We check out some more of the waterfront and are entertained by the antics of a group of seemingly conservative schoolgirls on a day out, dancing in their uniforms through a fountain spurting random jets of water. Seems they've all gone a bit mad here in the heat!
As we wait at the airport we can't help but notice the huge trolleys of rubbish from the dining areas, mountains of throw-away containers. It is definately a convenience society, but as we fly off to London, our lasting impressions of New York in the summer will include many images of a surprisingly relaxed city. Random artworks in parks and on the street, free concerts and plays, people happily going about their lives without fear of prejudice, a guy on the street playing drums on oven trays and buckets, a woman playing a multicoloured piano on the street, guys walking hand in hand, women in leotards doing aerobics on Brooklyn Bridge, a huge range of people walking the safe streets of Manhattan together, day and night.
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