NYC, Day 1
I took a New Jersey Transit bus into the City this morning. It cost $8.25 round trip, which is only $.25 more than the toll for the tunnel to get into Manhattan, let alone parking and the hassle of driving in the city. The bus dropped me off at the Port Authority on 42nd Street, and a very helpful man told me how to get to Ground Zero by subway. You buy 4 subway rides for $8 in a machine (thank goodness I knew how to use these machines from Europe - the instructions weren't that helpful, but at least they were in English!). In the subway, I saw tourists taking pictures of each other in front of overflowing trash cans. tee hee.
The subways are VERY NOISY because there are 4 tracks at each station, one on each side for stopping/loading and two in the middle for through trains, and you can have trains on all 4 tracks at once and then you have to put your fingers in your ears. But all the cars have air conditioning!
Ground Zero is a gigantic construction site surrounded by tourists. The entire thing is fenced off with painted panels showing simulations of the completed project, so you can only see into the site at the gate for the construction vehicles. Tourists are accomodated at the Memorial on Veysey Street, a block or so away, which has a few photos of the tragedy but is mostly a memorial for the responders (fire, police, EMTs). You can get an inexpensive paperback book of photos from one of the persistent vendors on the sidewalk outside, or an expensive hardback of same inside the memorial.
I tried to take a bus uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Let me tell you, don't bother! Take the subway! It took me 2.5 hours to get uptown by bus, and only 30 minutes to get back down by subway later. Of course I did stop off at Washington Square to listen to a banjo band on the way (not on purpose: I just had to change buses there).
I spent nearly 5 hours in the Met Mus Art and I only saw the rooftop sculpture and part of the second floor. I missed the first floor entirely! next time... It was so cool to see some of these paintings again, after they traveled for special exhibits to Europe. What a sense of recognition, like meeting a friend you haven't seen in a while but who still holds a place in your heart.
What paintings did I like?
Poplars, Eragny, by Camille Pissaro. From across the room it looks as detailed and clear as a Dutch interior, but up close it's a jumble of colors and brushwork. Random it ain't, but you'd never know it from a close inspection.
Benedict von Hertenstein by Hans Holbein looks exactly like one of my cousins.
Benjamin Franklin by Duplessis. What a familiar face from American history. I walked past later and it looked as though someone had drawn Dali's moustache on Franklin's upper lip! But no, it was a trick of the shadows.
Rembrandt made 75 self-portraits. Why, the curators asked? I think it was ego, but they had a long list of fancy reasons.
Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart by Frans Hals. They're laughing, raising glasses, hugging each other, generally having a good time. But it illustrates why most portraits don't show teeth! I wonder when dental hygiene became a matter of course?
Interior of the Old Church at Delft by Emanuel de Witte includes a dog raising his leg to water the base of a pillar - another Dutch painter putting accuracy and homely details into a painting.
Vermeer. That pearl earring of his shows up in a lot of paintings: at least 2 in this museum plus the famous namesake.
The museum staff kicked us all out at 5:15, so I took the subway back to the Port Authority building and the bus to home. My feet hurt. But B1 took me out to dinner for Italien food and I had an American wheat beer that tasted like blueberries. Weird.