- New York: Day 1 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- New York: Day 2 – MoMA and #BlizzardOf2015
Today was Day 1 in New York. Well, actually yesterday was technically Day 1, but that mostly involved flying from Heathrow to Brussles to New York. It was all relatively uneventful – except for the ridiculous high winds that caused rather a lot of turbulence for well over 50% of the flight. And the slippy landing at Brussles on an unprepared landing strip. And waiting over an hour for the car plane wash to remove the snow from the long-haul plane. And the almost 90 minute wait in customs in New York (so long, in fact, that our luggage was removed from the belt and dumped unceremoniously into the middle of the floor). And the subway line that wasn’t running on the weekends – which they didn’t tell you when you got the airport transfer train out to that particular subway – meaning we had to take a replacement shuttle bus at breakneck through Queens which was quite frankly terrifying.
However the hotel was an oasis of calm. The room is small. Tiny in fact. But we have the most wonderful rainforest shower and the bed is seriously comfortable. There’s a burger joint downstairs which appeared to do incredible vegetarian burgers, so Adam went downstairs to do the hunter-gatherer thing. Except it was closed for refurbishment so he headed down to the next block where he found a pizza place.
Holy Fuck. I’m telling you, Abitino’s Pizza is amazing. It tasted of everything New York should taste like as far as I’m concerned. We had thick Italian-American style pizza dough encasing various combinations of ricotta, mozzarella, aubergine and spinach. And the tomato sauce! The tomato sauce was amazing. I’m going to have to start experimenting with making my own tomato sauce this summer – better plant some tomatoes in the garden.
And then we pretty much just went to sleep because we were completely carbed out and we’d been up for about 24 hours or so. Living the high life, etc.
Midnight local time… woke up. Went back to sleep.
4am local time… woke up. Ate remaining pizza. Went back to sleep.
Got up… 6am.
Decided to go to the Met.
We walked 14km in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Yes, you read that right. 14km INSIDE the Met (and 6km there and back to the hotel).
We saw:
The American Wing
Arms and Armour
Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas
Modern and Contemporary Art
Medieval Art
Ancient Near Eastern Art
Art of the Arab Lands
Greek and Roman Art
Asian Art
19th and Early 20th Century European Art
Photographs
Musical Instruments.
Some Special Exhibitions
We might have seen about half of the place… back again later in the week. Check out the map here, with marks on to show you the bits that we managed to see.
More thoughts on the Met later.
Then we came back to the hotel. And died. And managed to eat some chips and dips before wandering to the local grocery store, drinking tea and watching trash TV. It’s a TV show where they bid on abandoned storage units and then sell the stuff they get. It’s very odd. But really rather good.
Over and out.
