How was your Christmas this past year (2007)? Here at the Jack house our Christmas was really short – we got up early Christmas morning, got our Christmas phone call from CJ in Bulgaria, opened up our Christmas presents, ate a lovely Christmas breakfast, and then at around noon we headed off to the airport in Las Vegas for our week-long vacation to New York City. We had originally booked our flights (way back in September) for the 26th, using our frequent flier miles, but later on we got bumped up to the afternoon of the 25th. I was a bit worried about having to extend our hotel for a day earlier, but it turned out that it wasn’t a problem since we already had our room booked for the rest of the week. We drove the two hours to Las Vegas without incident but at the airport we found the regular parking lots all full, so we followed the signs to a huge overflow parking lot temporarily located in a huge vacant lot between terminals 1 and 2. That turned out to be a good thing for us – it saved us $100 in parking fees. Once in the airport we got our boarding passes just fine and then headed off to pass through security – the lines at security were surprisingly short, but excruciatingly slooooow – the nimrod TSA man in charge of cross-checking ID’s and boarding passes was making a big production of every single person that was flying that day – I think he was mad that he had to work on Christmas day. But, after much delay we passed through OK and he didn’t even notice that Kat’s name was misspelled on her boarding pass. Out at the gate our flight was delayed for some reason – I think it was held up at the airport from whence it came – I was starting to worry about making our short turnaround time in Chicago. In fact, I was already worried about making our connection in Chicago since there was a big snow and ice storm happening in the mid-west, and flights had been delayed and cancelled the previous day – Les and I had even warned the girls that we could end up staying overnight in the airport in Chicago. Finally, it was time to board the plane; just ahead of us in line there was a family that gummed up the works – it turned out that their adult daughter didn’t have a boarding pass (just her ticket) – how she got past the nimrod at security I don’t know. Finally she was taken somewhere to get a boarding pass and the rest of us were allowed to board. After pushing off from the gate, but before taxiing out to the runway, our captain told us that we had to go back to the gate to take some people off of the airplane. It turned out that the family of the young lady without a boarding pass didn’t want to fly without her. Back at the gate, they deplaned, but before the crew re-closed the doors, they got back on WITH their daughter in tow – we had stalled long enough for her to get her boarding pass. So off we went, quite a bit late. Fortunately, it was just snowy enough in Chicago that our connecting flight was delayed even more, so we were able to make our connection just right. We landed at the La Guardia airport in New York City without any further incident, albeit pretty late (or early in the morning, as it were.) At the airport we found the taxi stand and took the next taxi in line – the driver was wearing a Punjabi and spoke with a Bangladeshi accent, so I started chatting with him. Turns out that he’s from Comilla, where I had done a lot of my work while working in Bangladesh back in the 90’s (we built a power plant there and I worked on bringing their electrical substations up to code), so I knew the area fairly well. Our driver took us directly to our hotel in a brief 20 minutes – there was hardly any traffic on the road at 2AM. Our hotel had our room all ready and waiting and we were more than ready to hit the hay. Our hotel was the Cosmopolitan Hotel Tribeca (http://www.cosmohotel.com/) in the downtown Tribeca area; it’s where Annie stayed during her trip with the model UN a couple of years ago. We picked it because it’s not only affordable, but it’s also very convenient to public transportation (several subway lines and a bus route.)
On the 26th we slept in a bit, due to having arrived so late, and to help acclimatize ourselves to the two-hour time difference. We only had one shower for the four of us in our room, so after I got the first shower I ran down to the street, to the store under the hotel, and bought us a quick breakfast of New York bagels and a carton of OJ. Then our first order of business was to go up to midtown to see the Empire State Building. We caught the subway right outside our hotel room – our first stop was at the vending machine where we bought each of us a MetroCard (see: http://www.mta.info/metrocard/) – it’s like a credit card that gets you a ride on either a bus or a subway. Each ride costs $2, or a one-week unlimited ride Metro pass is $24, so we were going to break even with the unlimited MetroCard by taking just one round trip each day. Anyway, armed with the free maps of the subway and bus system from the hotel lobby, we found our subway stop easily, and then a quick check of the subway exits got us to within a block of the Empire State Building (http://www.esbnyc.com/.) There was a long line at the entrance, but we got in line anyway and decided to wait our turn. The whole time we were waiting there were hawkers trying to talk us into catching a movie while we waited, (for some additional fee,) but we decided to just wait for the elevator ride instead. There are three lines at the Empire State Building – one (a long one) for the security checkpoint, another (a short one) for the ticket booth, and then another one (a long one) for the elevator itself – all together we spent the standard two hours waiting in line (the week between Christmas and New Years is certainly peak season in New York.) Once at the ticket booth we opted to buy the CityPass, which comes with tickets for six different attractions, with a few extras thrown in, for about half the price of regular admissions (see: http://www.citypass.com/city/ny.html?id=Z7JhdmKo.) I had actually shopped various pass books on-line, but the other passes cost considerably more money and came with a lot of attractions that we didn’t want and weren’t going to see. Our first ticket that we used was for the Empire State Building itself, and the extra item that came with the CityPass was that we got the audio tour thrown in for “free.” The view from the top was about what you’d expect – pretty spectacular – we could see all of Manhattan and the surrounding area. The audio tour was very informational and a worthwhile addition to the view, I’m glad we got it. When we finished seeing the sites from above, we took a little walk up 5th Avenue to the New York Public Library. There we took a tour of the library – their last of the day. Their building is spectacular, their collection impressive, and their rotating exhibit of items from their special collections was amazing. Currently on display was a Guttenberg Bible and a copy of “A Christmas Carol” that belonged to Charles Dickens himself and includes his own handwritten notes in the margins from his personal readings on Christmas Eves. After the library tour we took a little stroll over to Grand Central Station; by then it was time for a very late lunch/early dinner, so we stopped in at the world famous Juniors deli where we enjoyed their famous matzo ball soup and pastrami sandwiches, along with their (famous) New York cheesecake for dessert. Refueled we headed further uptown to see the big Christmas tree and skating rink at Rockefeller Center, and then we moseyed on up 5th Avenue and looked at the Christmas window displays in the big fancy department stores; even those had long lines of tourists waiting to see them. We wrapped up our evening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was beautiful by the way, and then caught a handy subway back to the hotel to get out of the sleet and snow. Day one in the city turned out to be a success – we figured out how to use public transportation, saw all of the major attractions on our list for that day, and didn’t get mugged. It’s funny – after so many years of bad press and being the “murder capital of the world”, I’d never considered going to New York City as a tourist. But in the spring of 2001, on my way home from Uganda, my flight to Las Vegas went through JFK and I sat with a bunch of New Yorkers – they told me about how much Mayor Giuliani had cleaned up the city and made it safe, and for the first time I considered going there as a tourist (AFTER having already tramped around Calcutta, Bangkok, Cairo, Katmandu, Dhaka, Hong Kong, etc.) In preparation for our trip, I’d done all of my research on-line, especially at the website: http://gonyc.about.com/, where I’d picked the attractions and restaurants with which to fill our itinerary.
On the 27th we got up a bit earlier than the day before, scarfed down our breakfast bagels from the deli downstairs, and then headed straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/) – the girls had been excited to go there ever since reading about it in “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” This was certainly #2 on our list of things to do in New York City (second only to the Empire State Building) and it was also included on our CityPass that we’d bought the day before. Plus, the CityPass got us past the long honking line of holiday tourists buying tickets. Knowing that we were going to spend the day in the climate controlled museum we checked our coats and bags – besides, the coat check is “free,” or at least included in the price of admission. The museum is huge, certainly requiring more than the single day that we had allotted to see it all, so we had to prioritize our time. We started out in the Egyptian section, Egypt being one of our favorite places. They had a lovely selection of artifacts, actual tombs, and even mummies from Egypt; but I’ve got to confess that it paled in comparison with the museums and tombs and mummies in Cairo, Giza, and Luxor, Egypt – I guess we should have done New York City before going to Egypt. But, at least I got to see and take my photo with the life-sized statue of the Pharaoh Horemheb – my own personal favorite pharaoh about whom I’ve drafted a whole book. After Egypt we decided to hit the sections with armor, medieval art, musical instruments, and then it was already lunch time, so Kat and I took a quick break and hit the hotdog vendors right outside by the museum steps. I’ve always heard about how great the hot dogs are in New York City, but I’ve got to say that they weren’t nearly as good or as filling (and certainly not as cheap) as those Hebrew National hotdogs that they sell at the food court in Costco. After scarfing down a quick dog in the light rain (with our coats still checked inside) Kat and I rejoined Les and Annie in the Japanese section – we did a quick walk through after they’d had a chance to really linger. Then we caught a couple more areas, notably the European, Assyrian, African, Roman, and Greek sections, by which time we were too tired to see more that day. I’d say we covered about half of the museum at best. So, after a full day in the museum, we headed over to Broadway and got in line to put our names in the drawing to try to win the opportunity to buy front row seats to “Wicked” – we didn’t win. We also decided that spending several hours in line for a show that we didn’t get to see wasn’t a particularly good use of our time, so we didn’t try that again. So we headed off Broadway, to the movie theater area, and got tickets to the new feel-good musical of the year, “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” starring Johnny Depp. Wow! Talk about your buckets of blood – I think it was too much for even me, and I have a pretty high tolerance for movie blood. After buying our tickets, but before the show started, we decided to get off the main drag and find a nice local place to eat. After walking down a couple of dark and dreary streets we found a little local pizza joint, named Don Giovanni’s, that still had a table open. The food was really good and it sure felt good to sit down and relax for a bit (and my teensie weensie hotdog lunch had well and truly worn off by then.)
On the 28th we got up even earlier (at 7AM NY time, 5AM UT time) and took a little walk around Chinatown, but the stores weren’t even open yet. But we did get to see the old folks out in the city park doing Tai Chi and the fan dance. So then we headed up to midtown to see the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/); here again our CityPass got us past all of the big long ticket lines and we got in to the exhibits a good half hour before it was officially open. We made a bee-line for the upper floors (4-6) so we could have some personal time with the big, really famous masterpieces of modern art by Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollack, Gauguin, Serot, etc. I’ve got to say that they were awesome. Our entrance fees also got us one of those recorded self-guided tours, which were interesting to listen too (mostly – they did tend to get a little long-winded.) I’ve got to say, that as we descended floors into the ever more modern pieces I started losing interest really quickly. Some of the stuff in the “Contemporary” Galleries weren’t worth much of a look – the works displayed there certainly were original, but not all that “artful.” By early afternoon we found ourselves more hungry than interested in lingering over the modern art any more, and the galleries were getting progressively more and more crowded, so we decided to go find food. On our way out the door Leslie asked the guard for a recommendation of where to find good inexpensive food and he directed us to just across the street and down the block to a little deli where they sold food by the pound, the West 53rd Gourmet Deli. It turned out to be really good. After our late lunch we decided that it was too late to go very far, but still too early to call it day, but we noticed on our city map that we weren’t far from the United Nations, so we caught a cross-town bus and just managed to catch the last tour of the day. Annie had been there a couple of years ago on her Model UN conference, so she got to tell us a couple of things that they did and saw at that time. Since it was after the normal business day, we got to see not only the General Assembly Hall, but also the Security Council Chamber (that had been occupied earlier, to discuss the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.) Our intern tour-guide from Italy was very nice and did a fine job showing us around, but her overly naïve idealism was evident from some the answers given to equally naïve questions from our tour group. It’s amazing to me how uninformed people can be on the realities of this world – it’s almost like they HAVEN’T spent a decade living and working overseas – or maybe I’ve just become too cynical because I HAVE. When they shut down the United Nations building and kicked out into the cold and dark, we caught a bus across town to Times Square for dinner at the Café Edison – also known as the Polish Tearoom, in what was formerly the ballroom in the old Edison Hotel – it was really fun. It was also really good food and pretty affordable – I recommend it. After dinner we took a little stroll down Broadway before catching a subway ride back to the hotel and calling it a day.
On Saturday the 29th we headed out early to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I had purchased ferry tickets on-line prior to coming to New York so that we could guarantee tickets to the museum in the base of the Statue of Liberty (they have a very limited number of admissions each day), so we just had to buzz down to Battery Park to catch the ferry. It turns out that our hotel was only two subway stops from the end of the line, where the stop for Battery Park is located. After we hopped on the first train going south, we heard a garbled announcement informing us that only the first five cars could debark at the Battery Park station!? We didn’t know which car we were in, but we were pretty sure that we were further back than number five, so we resolved to move up during the one stop between where we got on and where we were getting off. We also decided to move between cars so as to eliminate the risk of getting left behind during our car switch. So, as soon as our train stopped at the next station, we opened the door between the cars and dashed forward, but only advanced one car before the train started moving again. $#*?! Then, after some deliberation, we decided to ignore the signs that said “no changing cars while the train is moving”, and started moving forward again. We moved forward several cars, passing only homeless people who obviously live in the subway along the way, until we finally made it to the sixth car and found the door locked! That’s when we arrived at the station and saw that the platform was indeed only five cars long and we were still back in the tunnel. Through the window we could see the other, better informed passengers getting off the train, and we were stuck. Leslie, never knowing when to give up, started knocking on the door, hoping that the conductor would take mercy on us and let us out anyway. Much to my surprise, he actually did – he opened the door between our compartments and let us on to the fifth car, from which we could descend to the platform and head out to Battery Park. What a nice guy – taking pity on poor ignorant tourist like that! When we got to the ticket booth at Clinton Castle, we found that having purchased our tickets on-line allowed us to bypass a really huge line to buy the tickets on site – the will call window had no waiting. After picking up our tickets for both the ferry and the museum (see: http://www.nps.gov/stli/), we got in an even longer and slower line for the airport-type security before getting on the ferry to Liberty Island. The Circle Line ferry ride itself was fun, as it was turning into a gorgeous sunny day. We arrived on the island an hour or so before our scheduled museum time, so we caught the Ranger tour and lecture before going into the museum – that was nice too. When it was time to go to the museum (it turned out that they didn’t really care what time our tickets said and we could have gone into the museum whenever we wanted) we had to go through an ever more careful security screening. Les and the girls had to leave their purses in lockers outside the museum. It was fun seeing the museum and climbing the ten stories of stairs up to the top of the base of the statue, up to the feet of the statue itself. From Liberty Island we caught the ferry over to Ellis Island, to see the newly opened museum there. It turned out that there’s really not a lot to see there, as my ancestors were all in America before Ellis Island was the main immigration port (starting in 1890.) From there we headed back to Manhattan, where we took a hike up Wall Street, past the huge bronze bull smothered in tourists getting their photos taken, to Ground Zero, formally home of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Anymore there’s just a huge hole in the ground, crawling with construction workers busily building the new World Trade Center. Across the street we stopped in at St. Paul’s Church (where President George Washington had attended Sunday meetings while the capital of the U.S. was in NY) and looked at all of their 9-11 exhibits. St. Paul’s was used as a rest area during the rescue operations on 9-11 and only recently returned to duty as a church. From the Financial District we caught a subway up to Chinatown, where we ate some yummy food at the small but very popular Great NY Noodle Town. After dinner we wandered around Chinatown, checking out the sites and shops – it was nice, but not as exotic as, say, Hong Kong. We bought our standard set of souvenirs: a Christmas ornament for Leslie, keychain for CJ, statuette for Annie, spoon for Kat, “I ♥ NY” t-shirts all around, and these great huge confetti crackers that we just had to buy after seeing a shopkeeper demo them, filling the sky with confetti for minutes on end.
On the 30th we got up early and went to the American Museum of Natural History – see: http://www.amnh.org/) – also included on our CityPass. The pass included admission to the museum and to the show at the planetarium, “Cosmic Collisions.” The planetarium show was very interesting, explaining how the Earth and moon were formed by collisions, where different space rocks came together at precisely the correct angles and velocities and formed our perfectly balanced world and satellite, so as to give and preserve human life. What a miracle. After the show got out I asked my daughters if the scientific explanation of the creation convinced them to be atheists and abandon the notion that God was involved in the process. They told me that it was quite the contrary and that after seeing the skill and precision involved in the creation process, that the hand of God was even more apparent. I had to agree with their assessment. From the planetarium we headed up to the fourth floor where we enjoyed some world class dinosaur fossils – they certainly had things that I’d never seen before. We also took in their exhibit on “Mythical Creatures”, which explored the scientific basis for such mythical creatures as dragons, unicorns, mermaids, etc. From the fourth floor we worked our way down stairs, stopping in at reptiles, primates, Africa, Asia, North America and under the sea. We also saw the running H2O exhibit, which was really pretty boring – and I have a huge tolerance for didactic museum exhibits. We got to see a lot of old stuffed animals from all over the world – it was classic. It turned out that we spent the WHOLE day there – from opening to closing – only going out briefly at noon to scarf down a quick street-vendor hotdog before returning to our rounds. When we left the museum it was dark and cold and all of the other sites in town were closed, so we went looking for dinner. We ended up down in Little Italy where we ate some pizza from the oldest pizzeria in the United States, in an ancient restaurant called Lombardi’s (featured on both the History and Discovery Channels – see: http://www.firstpizza.com/.) The pizza was really good, so I’d recommend it.
On the 31st, our last day in New York, we went up early to the Guggenheim museum of modern art. Their famous Frank Lloyd Wright designed building was under wraps, getting its 50-year facelift. The admission was covered in our CityPass booklet, so we got to jump to the head of the line, where we picked up an audio guide, took the elevator to the top, and walked down the spiral exhibit hall down to the ground level. Their current exhibit, Richard Prince’s “Spiritual America” was a real disappointment – not just because it was “modern” but because it seemed to be largely the work of other artists all cobbled together (in fact, the museum’s guidebook states that “his art is pilfered directly from the image bank of popular culture”) – we only spent an hour there – I’d say it wasn’t worth it if the price of admission hadn’t been essentially free with our CityPass. From the museum we took a little walk through the southeast quarter of Central Park and saw the statues of Alice in Wonderland, Hans Christian Anderson, and Balto, and then stopped in for a quick lunch of very yummy burgers and fries at the hidden burger joint in the lobby of the Le Parker Meridien hotel. Just like I’d read, we had to ask the uniformed bellman to direct us to the hidden entrance to the burger joint, concealed behind the heavy black velvet curtain. The food was good, quick, and affordable, and it was fun to look at all of the celebrity autographs on the walls while we ate. From there we headed to Broadway to catch a matinee of “Spamalot” the musical version of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I had bought the tickets on-line before leaving home, to make sure that we had tickets to at least one Broadway show, in case we couldn’t find anything still available once we got to New York – it turned out that that was a good strategy, given the high volume of holiday traffic in town that week. The show was funny (I even stayed awake through most of it), but not necessarily better than the movie. They had added in some extraneous music here and there, but the best song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, it’s a real toe-tapper, was the one they swiped from their other movie, “The Life of Brian”. After the play we stopped in at Times Square to see if we wanted to watch the big ball drop and count down to New Years, but there were a million people there already (really) and we decided that we could watch the festivities better from our hotel room. Before going “home” we took in another movie: Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” which was fun to see because it was set in Manhattan where we had just spent a week site seeing. After the movie we pushed our way through the huge crowds moving in to Times Square and walked down Broadway to the Flat Iron building. By then we decided that it was time to catch the subway. We got out at City Hall (nearest to our hotel on that line) and then stopped in at our bagel shop to ask for recommendations for our New Years Eve dinner. We were recommended this little Italian place just around the corner, Gigino’s, which managed to squeeze us in, as we had the good fortune to show up just as another small family finished their dinner. The food was good, the atmosphere was great, the price was reasonable, and it was nice to finish up our week in New York with a great meal. After dinner we went back to our hotel room and shot off our huge Chinese crackers that we’d bought in Chinatown a couple of nights before – we really startled the other pedestrians in our neighborhood when we blew off the crackers at some random hour well before midnight. At midnight our bags were all packed up and ready to go and we were safely tucked in to our warm beds and watching the countdown in Times Square on TV like sensible New Yorkers (who didn’t want anything to do with all of the drunken tourists actually on-site.) We blew our little party horns at midnight and then turned off the lights.
Then, too soon it was January 1st and time to fly home. We had arranged for a car to pick us up at the hotel to drive us to the airport. In New York City they don’t allow cabs to be dispatched directly to hotels, but it turned out that there were plenty of them cruising the streets, even early on New Years Day. Our flights back to Las Vegas were totally uneventful and we arrived home safe and sound, without any problems, so we can count this as another successful family holiday outing.
On the 26th we slept in a bit, due to having arrived so late, and to help acclimatize ourselves to the two-hour time difference. We only had one shower for the four of us in our room, so after I got the first shower I ran down to the street, to the store under the hotel, and bought us a quick breakfast of New York bagels and a carton of OJ. Then our first order of business was to go up to midtown to see the Empire State Building. We caught the subway right outside our hotel room – our first stop was at the vending machine where we bought each of us a MetroCard (see: http://www.mta.info/metrocard/) – it’s like a credit card that gets you a ride on either a bus or a subway. Each ride costs $2, or a one-week unlimited ride Metro pass is $24, so we were going to break even with the unlimited MetroCard by taking just one round trip each day. Anyway, armed with the free maps of the subway and bus system from the hotel lobby, we found our subway stop easily, and then a quick check of the subway exits got us to within a block of the Empire State Building (http://www.esbnyc.com/.) There was a long line at the entrance, but we got in line anyway and decided to wait our turn. The whole time we were waiting there were hawkers trying to talk us into catching a movie while we waited, (for some additional fee,) but we decided to just wait for the elevator ride instead. There are three lines at the Empire State Building – one (a long one) for the security checkpoint, another (a short one) for the ticket booth, and then another one (a long one) for the elevator itself – all together we spent the standard two hours waiting in line (the week between Christmas and New Years is certainly peak season in New York.) Once at the ticket booth we opted to buy the CityPass, which comes with tickets for six different attractions, with a few extras thrown in, for about half the price of regular admissions (see: http://www.citypass.com/city/ny.html?id=Z7JhdmKo.) I had actually shopped various pass books on-line, but the other passes cost considerably more money and came with a lot of attractions that we didn’t want and weren’t going to see. Our first ticket that we used was for the Empire State Building itself, and the extra item that came with the CityPass was that we got the audio tour thrown in for “free.” The view from the top was about what you’d expect – pretty spectacular – we could see all of Manhattan and the surrounding area. The audio tour was very informational and a worthwhile addition to the view, I’m glad we got it. When we finished seeing the sites from above, we took a little walk up 5th Avenue to the New York Public Library. There we took a tour of the library – their last of the day. Their building is spectacular, their collection impressive, and their rotating exhibit of items from their special collections was amazing. Currently on display was a Guttenberg Bible and a copy of “A Christmas Carol” that belonged to Charles Dickens himself and includes his own handwritten notes in the margins from his personal readings on Christmas Eves. After the library tour we took a little stroll over to Grand Central Station; by then it was time for a very late lunch/early dinner, so we stopped in at the world famous Juniors deli where we enjoyed their famous matzo ball soup and pastrami sandwiches, along with their (famous) New York cheesecake for dessert. Refueled we headed further uptown to see the big Christmas tree and skating rink at Rockefeller Center, and then we moseyed on up 5th Avenue and looked at the Christmas window displays in the big fancy department stores; even those had long lines of tourists waiting to see them. We wrapped up our evening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was beautiful by the way, and then caught a handy subway back to the hotel to get out of the sleet and snow. Day one in the city turned out to be a success – we figured out how to use public transportation, saw all of the major attractions on our list for that day, and didn’t get mugged. It’s funny – after so many years of bad press and being the “murder capital of the world”, I’d never considered going to New York City as a tourist. But in the spring of 2001, on my way home from Uganda, my flight to Las Vegas went through JFK and I sat with a bunch of New Yorkers – they told me about how much Mayor Giuliani had cleaned up the city and made it safe, and for the first time I considered going there as a tourist (AFTER having already tramped around Calcutta, Bangkok, Cairo, Katmandu, Dhaka, Hong Kong, etc.) In preparation for our trip, I’d done all of my research on-line, especially at the website: http://gonyc.about.com/, where I’d picked the attractions and restaurants with which to fill our itinerary.
On the 27th we got up a bit earlier than the day before, scarfed down our breakfast bagels from the deli downstairs, and then headed straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/) – the girls had been excited to go there ever since reading about it in “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” This was certainly #2 on our list of things to do in New York City (second only to the Empire State Building) and it was also included on our CityPass that we’d bought the day before. Plus, the CityPass got us past the long honking line of holiday tourists buying tickets. Knowing that we were going to spend the day in the climate controlled museum we checked our coats and bags – besides, the coat check is “free,” or at least included in the price of admission. The museum is huge, certainly requiring more than the single day that we had allotted to see it all, so we had to prioritize our time. We started out in the Egyptian section, Egypt being one of our favorite places. They had a lovely selection of artifacts, actual tombs, and even mummies from Egypt; but I’ve got to confess that it paled in comparison with the museums and tombs and mummies in Cairo, Giza, and Luxor, Egypt – I guess we should have done New York City before going to Egypt. But, at least I got to see and take my photo with the life-sized statue of the Pharaoh Horemheb – my own personal favorite pharaoh about whom I’ve drafted a whole book. After Egypt we decided to hit the sections with armor, medieval art, musical instruments, and then it was already lunch time, so Kat and I took a quick break and hit the hotdog vendors right outside by the museum steps. I’ve always heard about how great the hot dogs are in New York City, but I’ve got to say that they weren’t nearly as good or as filling (and certainly not as cheap) as those Hebrew National hotdogs that they sell at the food court in Costco. After scarfing down a quick dog in the light rain (with our coats still checked inside) Kat and I rejoined Les and Annie in the Japanese section – we did a quick walk through after they’d had a chance to really linger. Then we caught a couple more areas, notably the European, Assyrian, African, Roman, and Greek sections, by which time we were too tired to see more that day. I’d say we covered about half of the museum at best. So, after a full day in the museum, we headed over to Broadway and got in line to put our names in the drawing to try to win the opportunity to buy front row seats to “Wicked” – we didn’t win. We also decided that spending several hours in line for a show that we didn’t get to see wasn’t a particularly good use of our time, so we didn’t try that again. So we headed off Broadway, to the movie theater area, and got tickets to the new feel-good musical of the year, “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” starring Johnny Depp. Wow! Talk about your buckets of blood – I think it was too much for even me, and I have a pretty high tolerance for movie blood. After buying our tickets, but before the show started, we decided to get off the main drag and find a nice local place to eat. After walking down a couple of dark and dreary streets we found a little local pizza joint, named Don Giovanni’s, that still had a table open. The food was really good and it sure felt good to sit down and relax for a bit (and my teensie weensie hotdog lunch had well and truly worn off by then.)
On the 28th we got up even earlier (at 7AM NY time, 5AM UT time) and took a little walk around Chinatown, but the stores weren’t even open yet. But we did get to see the old folks out in the city park doing Tai Chi and the fan dance. So then we headed up to midtown to see the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/); here again our CityPass got us past all of the big long ticket lines and we got in to the exhibits a good half hour before it was officially open. We made a bee-line for the upper floors (4-6) so we could have some personal time with the big, really famous masterpieces of modern art by Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollack, Gauguin, Serot, etc. I’ve got to say that they were awesome. Our entrance fees also got us one of those recorded self-guided tours, which were interesting to listen too (mostly – they did tend to get a little long-winded.) I’ve got to say, that as we descended floors into the ever more modern pieces I started losing interest really quickly. Some of the stuff in the “Contemporary” Galleries weren’t worth much of a look – the works displayed there certainly were original, but not all that “artful.” By early afternoon we found ourselves more hungry than interested in lingering over the modern art any more, and the galleries were getting progressively more and more crowded, so we decided to go find food. On our way out the door Leslie asked the guard for a recommendation of where to find good inexpensive food and he directed us to just across the street and down the block to a little deli where they sold food by the pound, the West 53rd Gourmet Deli. It turned out to be really good. After our late lunch we decided that it was too late to go very far, but still too early to call it day, but we noticed on our city map that we weren’t far from the United Nations, so we caught a cross-town bus and just managed to catch the last tour of the day. Annie had been there a couple of years ago on her Model UN conference, so she got to tell us a couple of things that they did and saw at that time. Since it was after the normal business day, we got to see not only the General Assembly Hall, but also the Security Council Chamber (that had been occupied earlier, to discuss the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.) Our intern tour-guide from Italy was very nice and did a fine job showing us around, but her overly naïve idealism was evident from some the answers given to equally naïve questions from our tour group. It’s amazing to me how uninformed people can be on the realities of this world – it’s almost like they HAVEN’T spent a decade living and working overseas – or maybe I’ve just become too cynical because I HAVE. When they shut down the United Nations building and kicked out into the cold and dark, we caught a bus across town to Times Square for dinner at the Café Edison – also known as the Polish Tearoom, in what was formerly the ballroom in the old Edison Hotel – it was really fun. It was also really good food and pretty affordable – I recommend it. After dinner we took a little stroll down Broadway before catching a subway ride back to the hotel and calling it a day.
On Saturday the 29th we headed out early to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I had purchased ferry tickets on-line prior to coming to New York so that we could guarantee tickets to the museum in the base of the Statue of Liberty (they have a very limited number of admissions each day), so we just had to buzz down to Battery Park to catch the ferry. It turns out that our hotel was only two subway stops from the end of the line, where the stop for Battery Park is located. After we hopped on the first train going south, we heard a garbled announcement informing us that only the first five cars could debark at the Battery Park station!? We didn’t know which car we were in, but we were pretty sure that we were further back than number five, so we resolved to move up during the one stop between where we got on and where we were getting off. We also decided to move between cars so as to eliminate the risk of getting left behind during our car switch. So, as soon as our train stopped at the next station, we opened the door between the cars and dashed forward, but only advanced one car before the train started moving again. $#*?! Then, after some deliberation, we decided to ignore the signs that said “no changing cars while the train is moving”, and started moving forward again. We moved forward several cars, passing only homeless people who obviously live in the subway along the way, until we finally made it to the sixth car and found the door locked! That’s when we arrived at the station and saw that the platform was indeed only five cars long and we were still back in the tunnel. Through the window we could see the other, better informed passengers getting off the train, and we were stuck. Leslie, never knowing when to give up, started knocking on the door, hoping that the conductor would take mercy on us and let us out anyway. Much to my surprise, he actually did – he opened the door between our compartments and let us on to the fifth car, from which we could descend to the platform and head out to Battery Park. What a nice guy – taking pity on poor ignorant tourist like that! When we got to the ticket booth at Clinton Castle, we found that having purchased our tickets on-line allowed us to bypass a really huge line to buy the tickets on site – the will call window had no waiting. After picking up our tickets for both the ferry and the museum (see: http://www.nps.gov/stli/), we got in an even longer and slower line for the airport-type security before getting on the ferry to Liberty Island. The Circle Line ferry ride itself was fun, as it was turning into a gorgeous sunny day. We arrived on the island an hour or so before our scheduled museum time, so we caught the Ranger tour and lecture before going into the museum – that was nice too. When it was time to go to the museum (it turned out that they didn’t really care what time our tickets said and we could have gone into the museum whenever we wanted) we had to go through an ever more careful security screening. Les and the girls had to leave their purses in lockers outside the museum. It was fun seeing the museum and climbing the ten stories of stairs up to the top of the base of the statue, up to the feet of the statue itself. From Liberty Island we caught the ferry over to Ellis Island, to see the newly opened museum there. It turned out that there’s really not a lot to see there, as my ancestors were all in America before Ellis Island was the main immigration port (starting in 1890.) From there we headed back to Manhattan, where we took a hike up Wall Street, past the huge bronze bull smothered in tourists getting their photos taken, to Ground Zero, formally home of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Anymore there’s just a huge hole in the ground, crawling with construction workers busily building the new World Trade Center. Across the street we stopped in at St. Paul’s Church (where President George Washington had attended Sunday meetings while the capital of the U.S. was in NY) and looked at all of their 9-11 exhibits. St. Paul’s was used as a rest area during the rescue operations on 9-11 and only recently returned to duty as a church. From the Financial District we caught a subway up to Chinatown, where we ate some yummy food at the small but very popular Great NY Noodle Town. After dinner we wandered around Chinatown, checking out the sites and shops – it was nice, but not as exotic as, say, Hong Kong. We bought our standard set of souvenirs: a Christmas ornament for Leslie, keychain for CJ, statuette for Annie, spoon for Kat, “I ♥ NY” t-shirts all around, and these great huge confetti crackers that we just had to buy after seeing a shopkeeper demo them, filling the sky with confetti for minutes on end.
On the 30th we got up early and went to the American Museum of Natural History – see: http://www.amnh.org/) – also included on our CityPass. The pass included admission to the museum and to the show at the planetarium, “Cosmic Collisions.” The planetarium show was very interesting, explaining how the Earth and moon were formed by collisions, where different space rocks came together at precisely the correct angles and velocities and formed our perfectly balanced world and satellite, so as to give and preserve human life. What a miracle. After the show got out I asked my daughters if the scientific explanation of the creation convinced them to be atheists and abandon the notion that God was involved in the process. They told me that it was quite the contrary and that after seeing the skill and precision involved in the creation process, that the hand of God was even more apparent. I had to agree with their assessment. From the planetarium we headed up to the fourth floor where we enjoyed some world class dinosaur fossils – they certainly had things that I’d never seen before. We also took in their exhibit on “Mythical Creatures”, which explored the scientific basis for such mythical creatures as dragons, unicorns, mermaids, etc. From the fourth floor we worked our way down stairs, stopping in at reptiles, primates, Africa, Asia, North America and under the sea. We also saw the running H2O exhibit, which was really pretty boring – and I have a huge tolerance for didactic museum exhibits. We got to see a lot of old stuffed animals from all over the world – it was classic. It turned out that we spent the WHOLE day there – from opening to closing – only going out briefly at noon to scarf down a quick street-vendor hotdog before returning to our rounds. When we left the museum it was dark and cold and all of the other sites in town were closed, so we went looking for dinner. We ended up down in Little Italy where we ate some pizza from the oldest pizzeria in the United States, in an ancient restaurant called Lombardi’s (featured on both the History and Discovery Channels – see: http://www.firstpizza.com/.) The pizza was really good, so I’d recommend it.
On the 31st, our last day in New York, we went up early to the Guggenheim museum of modern art. Their famous Frank Lloyd Wright designed building was under wraps, getting its 50-year facelift. The admission was covered in our CityPass booklet, so we got to jump to the head of the line, where we picked up an audio guide, took the elevator to the top, and walked down the spiral exhibit hall down to the ground level. Their current exhibit, Richard Prince’s “Spiritual America” was a real disappointment – not just because it was “modern” but because it seemed to be largely the work of other artists all cobbled together (in fact, the museum’s guidebook states that “his art is pilfered directly from the image bank of popular culture”) – we only spent an hour there – I’d say it wasn’t worth it if the price of admission hadn’t been essentially free with our CityPass. From the museum we took a little walk through the southeast quarter of Central Park and saw the statues of Alice in Wonderland, Hans Christian Anderson, and Balto, and then stopped in for a quick lunch of very yummy burgers and fries at the hidden burger joint in the lobby of the Le Parker Meridien hotel. Just like I’d read, we had to ask the uniformed bellman to direct us to the hidden entrance to the burger joint, concealed behind the heavy black velvet curtain. The food was good, quick, and affordable, and it was fun to look at all of the celebrity autographs on the walls while we ate. From there we headed to Broadway to catch a matinee of “Spamalot” the musical version of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I had bought the tickets on-line before leaving home, to make sure that we had tickets to at least one Broadway show, in case we couldn’t find anything still available once we got to New York – it turned out that that was a good strategy, given the high volume of holiday traffic in town that week. The show was funny (I even stayed awake through most of it), but not necessarily better than the movie. They had added in some extraneous music here and there, but the best song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, it’s a real toe-tapper, was the one they swiped from their other movie, “The Life of Brian”. After the play we stopped in at Times Square to see if we wanted to watch the big ball drop and count down to New Years, but there were a million people there already (really) and we decided that we could watch the festivities better from our hotel room. Before going “home” we took in another movie: Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” which was fun to see because it was set in Manhattan where we had just spent a week site seeing. After the movie we pushed our way through the huge crowds moving in to Times Square and walked down Broadway to the Flat Iron building. By then we decided that it was time to catch the subway. We got out at City Hall (nearest to our hotel on that line) and then stopped in at our bagel shop to ask for recommendations for our New Years Eve dinner. We were recommended this little Italian place just around the corner, Gigino’s, which managed to squeeze us in, as we had the good fortune to show up just as another small family finished their dinner. The food was good, the atmosphere was great, the price was reasonable, and it was nice to finish up our week in New York with a great meal. After dinner we went back to our hotel room and shot off our huge Chinese crackers that we’d bought in Chinatown a couple of nights before – we really startled the other pedestrians in our neighborhood when we blew off the crackers at some random hour well before midnight. At midnight our bags were all packed up and ready to go and we were safely tucked in to our warm beds and watching the countdown in Times Square on TV like sensible New Yorkers (who didn’t want anything to do with all of the drunken tourists actually on-site.) We blew our little party horns at midnight and then turned off the lights.
Then, too soon it was January 1st and time to fly home. We had arranged for a car to pick us up at the hotel to drive us to the airport. In New York City they don’t allow cabs to be dispatched directly to hotels, but it turned out that there were plenty of them cruising the streets, even early on New Years Day. Our flights back to Las Vegas were totally uneventful and we arrived home safe and sound, without any problems, so we can count this as another successful family holiday outing.
