Back in LA
I flew back yesterday (Wednesday).
My last few days in NY mainly involved walking around and doing some light shopping. We went ice skating in Central Park on Sat night, which was awesome! I wasn't very good, but then it is only the third time I've been ice skating in my life. Sunday was horrible and rainy, so I spent it back at the Met. This time I had a look at some of the rest of the museum. I took a tour through their Egyptian collection, including a whole temple salvaged from the banks of the Nile (a gift from Egypt). The whole exhibition was pretty impressive. I also spent some time wandering through period rooms - where they take a whole room and decorate it in the style of a particular time period. In some cases they've relocated actual rooms from buildings that were going to be demolished. They're all very opulent!
Monday and Tuesday were spent wandering around Midtown and Downtown NY respectively. Midtown is where Times Square is. I went through the M&Ms store, and got my portrait done in charcoal by the side of the road. I also wandered through all 9(!) floors of Macy's and went up the Empire State Building in the evening. There was a lot of cloud so the sunset wasn't that great, but the view was fantastic, especially once the lights came out.
Downtown is around where Chinatown and Little Italy are - the Lower East Side. This whole area was the where new immigrants settled, back in the day, so it's got a lot of historical buildings. I took a tour through the Tenement Museum - an old 1900s tenement building typical of the kind of accommodation new immigrants lived in during that time. I couldn't take any photos, but you can see some here: http://www.tenement.org/about.html. The apartments were very small and dark. Apparently you could have up to 12 people living in tiny little 3 room apartments, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. Chinatown itself reminded me a lot of Hong Kong, but much less hot and crowded. I had spaghetti and meatballs in a small restaurant in Little Italy, but alas there was only one meatball. It appears that Disney has lied to me :( It was a very good meatball though.
The next morning I had some time to kill before my flight so I went to the Cloisters, which houses the majority of the Met's medieval collection. A lot of the collection is actually various architectural elements, such as doors, windows and even whole rooms. What they've done is build a modern building in a vaguely medieval style which incorporates and thus displays all these elements, as well as providing a space to display all the stand-alone items. It's very cool! I was very surprised to find the famous Unicorn tapestries there - I've read about them and they're very well known, but I didn't actually realise the Met had them. They're really fantastically done - absolute masterpieces!
The plan for this weekend involved going to Las Vegas, which I'm quite excited about :)
My last few days in NY mainly involved walking around and doing some light shopping. We went ice skating in Central Park on Sat night, which was awesome! I wasn't very good, but then it is only the third time I've been ice skating in my life. Sunday was horrible and rainy, so I spent it back at the Met. This time I had a look at some of the rest of the museum. I took a tour through their Egyptian collection, including a whole temple salvaged from the banks of the Nile (a gift from Egypt). The whole exhibition was pretty impressive. I also spent some time wandering through period rooms - where they take a whole room and decorate it in the style of a particular time period. In some cases they've relocated actual rooms from buildings that were going to be demolished. They're all very opulent!
Monday and Tuesday were spent wandering around Midtown and Downtown NY respectively. Midtown is where Times Square is. I went through the M&Ms store, and got my portrait done in charcoal by the side of the road. I also wandered through all 9(!) floors of Macy's and went up the Empire State Building in the evening. There was a lot of cloud so the sunset wasn't that great, but the view was fantastic, especially once the lights came out.
Downtown is around where Chinatown and Little Italy are - the Lower East Side. This whole area was the where new immigrants settled, back in the day, so it's got a lot of historical buildings. I took a tour through the Tenement Museum - an old 1900s tenement building typical of the kind of accommodation new immigrants lived in during that time. I couldn't take any photos, but you can see some here: http://www.tenement.org/about.html. The apartments were very small and dark. Apparently you could have up to 12 people living in tiny little 3 room apartments, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. Chinatown itself reminded me a lot of Hong Kong, but much less hot and crowded. I had spaghetti and meatballs in a small restaurant in Little Italy, but alas there was only one meatball. It appears that Disney has lied to me :( It was a very good meatball though.
The next morning I had some time to kill before my flight so I went to the Cloisters, which houses the majority of the Met's medieval collection. A lot of the collection is actually various architectural elements, such as doors, windows and even whole rooms. What they've done is build a modern building in a vaguely medieval style which incorporates and thus displays all these elements, as well as providing a space to display all the stand-alone items. It's very cool! I was very surprised to find the famous Unicorn tapestries there - I've read about them and they're very well known, but I didn't actually realise the Met had them. They're really fantastically done - absolute masterpieces!
The plan for this weekend involved going to Las Vegas, which I'm quite excited about :)