Tuesday, February 21st

Today Linda and I went about remedying our museum and cultural shortcomings and headed first to the Guggenheim here I am on a lower tier.

And here is Linda with a David Smith sculpture.


And of course we had to go visit Patience and Fortitude (lions) at the Central Library and go to Bravo Pizza for STUFFFED pizza.


So we do know how to enjoy ourselves in the big apple

Monday, February 20th

Monday in New York started with shopping, for her, it was shoes and a sale skirt. For me, it was a visit to the legendary B & H photo, the above picture is walking near there with the empire state building up the street

The afternoon brings disappointment to us at the Neue Gallery. We thought we would be enjoying a new gallery. We have visited the MOMA and Metropolitan on many previous occasions. The attraction for us particularly to the Neue is that they own a fair number of Gustav Klimt paintings something which we both like. When we arrived we were surprised at discovering a 45 minute line to get in which we waited out. Entry fees and waiting in wind and chill later, we discover that the special exhibit of a tortured artist has displaced all Klimts from the gallery walls, and that the long wait was due to that showing's last day.

In the afternoon, I did finally get to go to ZABAR'S where I had a great crab bisque, and sandwich while Linda enjoyed Matzo ball soup and a genuine spinach knish. I always remember a bit of "classical rap" that has a reference to this place.

In our new found tradition of staying up late, Linda and I spent the after hours doing fafsa's and CSS profiles until our eyes got crossed. It's amazing what you can do with a computer on the move, I guess it was a bit of taking our work with us, but it had to be done at some point, and our finishing it turned out to be very timely all around.

Sunday February 19th
Today in New York starts with a touch of brunch at the nearby "europa" just a few blocks from the Pickwick. We do a wild goose chase to Chelsea which we understood to be the new Greenwich Village. All we seem to find are highrise, maybe wholesale galleries with locked front lobbies.

Oh well, we worked our way to finding a renovated Nabisco baking factory with cool stores and great food shops along with good eateries. Amy's bakery is neat, and we end up eating at Franks, a meat shop and restaurant. The meat locker has hanging in it aged beef cuts, not the factory stuff you see at the supermarket. I'm torn between getting a great steak, but settle for veal kidneys in cognac sauce, which isn't on most menus either. Linda goes for crab cakes, for which I'm jealous.

Below is a shot of me in a high density apartment part of the Chelsea area. It reminds me of visiting Mong Kok, in Kowloon (Hong Kong) which I have been told is the highest density area of the world - at something like a 500,000 people per square mile.

Also here in the Chelsea area, Linda falls in love with this saying

Our day heads to a high point in the evening at the New Amsterdam theater for the performance of The "Lion King".

This production is really great and we really enjoyed it. It is a great coming together of dance, Cirque du Soleil, acrobatics all set to the Lion King story and accompanied by Elton John compositions. If you have a chance, go, go, go.

As another first for me, Linda took me for a walk up Times Square, it all felt a bit like Las Vegas lights, although a tad colder. Again, we turn in way past my normal bedtime, but looking forward to tomorrows adventures.

Wednesday February 22nd
Today we are at "mom's", Jean's house. Linda and her brother Carl along with their mother have gone off and I'm sitting here in the house and slowing down after several days of "New York" touring and experiencing. In fact I guess we were on the go so much the last few days, I never stopped to try to get this blog further along. So, what follows here is a synopsis - sampler of my time with Linda in Manhatten along with some otherwise random thoughts.

So this is maybe my 5th at least visit to the big apple, although I would have to say that before I came here with Linda, I never really got to savor the flavor of the place. I am getting to love this town more and more. On the practical side, I am starting to get the hang of getting around town even though I am just starting to scratch the surface of familiarity with various terms like upper or lower, or Chelsea or whatever those mean in physical placement.

One thing has very much changed in my mind in my current experience is a definition of "downtown". I grew up with the concept that downtown was a "place", specifically the center of a city with implications of government and shopping areas. Manhattan island however being a generally elongated north-south oriented space, has signage for buses and subways which refer to "uptown" and "downtown". AHA! what a revelation that this means going up or down, which is what I call going north or south, but so goes the local vernacular. I still think that many people use downtown the way I grew up believing, and in going there it doesn't matter which cardinal direction one comes from.

Along with xxxx-town revelations, I opted to pick up unlimited metro-passes which allowed us to travel on any of the busses or subways for the entire period of our visit. That was great, it didn't matter (monetary wise at least) if we took the wrong bus or turn. It didn't cost us another $2.00 to get on the next one to get us back on track. For anyone visiting NY I highly recommend it, for our trip, a 7 day unlimited pass was $24. We more than got our money's worth in 4 days.

After our recovery (nap) Saturday morning, we just ambled around the city, went to the Whitney museum, had dinner at a closeby indian eatery, and went on to a jazz club for a "set" by the George Coleman Quartet. The jazz club for us is kind of reaching out there, the set started at 9:00 pm, a time that I am usually in bed. This kind of established the pattern for the next few days. And if anyone is paying attention to the math, I am 3 hours later in the day from my normal time zone, just flown a red-eye with only tid-bits of naps in an cramped upright position, and taken only a 2 hour nap for the day!!!! Also I missed my morning 3 cups of coffee. So it is probably amazing that I actually enjoyed the jazz at the end of a day whose beginning was only a dim memory, three time zones and 40 plus hours earlier. Gawd, I don't remember ever having worn my contacts so long. So that was it for one long day.

This is the beginning of my blog. I am nearing my 60th year and this is now the year of the dog on the chinese calender. Since there is a cycle of 12 years for each of the year signs, I have returned to the 5th cycle of the "Year of the Dog". To help celebrate my birthday, Linda and I took what is her school "spring" break and took off for New York, NY. We are of the understanding that many folks are taking off for vacations spots like Hawaii for instance. We on the other hand have opted to go to the big apple. In order to maximize our time here, we flew on Alaska Airlines> Delta Airlines> Song Airlines. We haven't fully understood what that sequence means as to who owns what or who operates whatever. However, our flight was at 10:00 pm Friday night February 17th, and we nearly joyfully arrived on Saturday Morning before 6:00 am so we could have the whole day ahead of us.

6:00 am at JFK waiting for a bus to get us up into mid-town Manhattan is a long wait when it is 26 degrees out! 40 minutes of this was enough, we worked out with two other travelers to share a taxi and we got delivered to within a few blocks from our reservations at the Pickwick Hotel. From this point on our luck has been working out well. Before 7:00 am, we were tucked into a bed here to take a nap, thankful that the hotel let us check in early (I think of this as really early, I can think of occasions that a hotel thought that 4:00 pm as "early")

One of our discoveries during the process of getting from home to NY was nice, we passed TWO Deborah Butterfield sculptures. The only one we had been familiar with is Styr located on Ankeny field at Whitman College. We love these bronze sculptures of horses fashioned from driftwood elements. There is one in the Delta terminal at SFO, the second one we saw was on the grass in the traffic island in New York on Madison Avenue near 54th Street!