Last day of our NY Pass and last full day in NY, and the US.
Poured with rain all night and was still looking pretty dire when we set
off this morning for our scheduled 9:05am Top of the Rock appointment. Having
booked it with our NY Pass we knew we could rearrange it for tomorrow, even
though that's after the end of our Pass, so got there and did that – rebooked for
sunset tomorrow, just before we fly out. Fingers crossed the weather’s OK and
we can actually see something!
With the weather so awful it was clear we couldn’t do our remaining
outdoor Pass activity, a bike tour round Central Park, so today became a museum
day.
Started at MoMA, and spent a fantastic morning there amongst the
Warhols, Pollocks, Mondrians, Picassos, Kahlos… They had a great Matisse
exhibition of his cut-outs, and Monet’s waterlilies pieces were really lovely.
Not wanting to miss a DW connection, we made sure we saw Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry
Night’ (see ‘Vincent and the Doctor’). And the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition was
cool, too.
In search of some lunch and heading towards The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, we found ourselves walking up Madison through the Upper East Side, a very
exclusive and expensive area. Baulked at the prices of a few places before
finding a nice-looking deli-type place and going for it…only to find it even
more pricey! Felt a bit out of place amongst the posh lunchtime clientele, so
grabbed a quick bowl of soup each – the best
soup we’d ever tasted, natch – and then bailed.
Next stop was The Met, which turned out to be much more huge and
impressive than I had imagined. It’s like the British Museum, only bigger (it
seemed) and better! One could easily spend days in there, no exaggeration, but
we only had the energy for a couple of hours.
Started off in the European Paintings section, having done the modern
stuff in the morning. An absolutely mind-blowing collection, so many paintings,
so many incredible images – Vermeer, El Greco, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Titian,
Van Dyck – amazing. Room after room of stunning stuff.
Obviously there was a lot of religious iconography, and after one
particularly extravagant room Ruth asked Finley what he thought the overall
theme might be.
“Er, flying babies?”
Spot on. The boys and I had fun imagining what some of the younger ‘models’
might have been saying as Mary was standing on their heads or they were weeing
on Venus.
There was so much to see there that we were utterly exhausted and really
couldn’t work out what else to look at, but Dylan was keen on seeing at the
medieval suits of armour…including Henry VIII’s and many other amazing
examples. The horse armour was particularly cool.
Then took a quick turn through some of the ancient antiquities,
including an entire temple brought from Dendur in Nubia last century and
covered in carved 19th-century graffiti, an awesome Egyptian tomb, countless
beautiful statues, amphora, sarcophagi…endless wonder.
Almost museumed-out, we made a quick stop at a playground in Central
Park before ducking in to the Guggenheim. Stunning building...
..crazy exhibition. Dylan’s
summary of the works was ‘bonkers’. Finley’s favourite was a sandpit of dyed
blue sand.
So apart from tomorrow’s Top of the Rock (weather permitting), that was the
end of our New York Pass. Our approach had been to cram in as much as possible
to make the most of the Pass, and we therefore did a bunch of stuff that we
wouldn’t otherwise have paid for. Most of that was really good, and ultimately
we certainly got our money’s worth, but in hindsight I probably wouldn’t
recommend the approach. There’s a lot of stuff that we could have done without,
and more time for things like The Met, which isn’t expensive in itself, would
have been good.
But we will all be back in New York, as a family or not, and will have
the opportunity to revisit those highlights, so it’s all good. Squeezing in
lots of things certainly kept the kids entertained, even if all our feet were
aching by the end of each day.
When we left the Guggenheim it was properly raining, as it had been
threatening to do all day, and with little option but to walk across town, we
got soaked. Crossed the park and stopped in at Strawberry Fields very briefly,
then walked past the Dakota, the very spot where Lennon was shot, before
getting back to the apartment.
We had a dinner date arranged with Tan & Dan plus Alex & Jim, sans enfants, so once the child-minder
had arrived we set off out into the rain again. Tan had another function to
attend briefly and Dan was going straight from work, and we were meeting
A&J on the Lower East Side, so Ruth & I were getting the subway on our
own.
We’d studied the map and Dan had explained some of the shortcomings of the
system – which I, frankly, was rather disappointed by. It seems back in the day
there were three different subway companies, so even though it is now one
system there is little cohesion, and it’s not as easy to get around as one
feels it could or should be, or is in, say, London or Paris. Getting across
town is virtually impossible, for example, and our best route to get from the Upper
West to the Lower East was not immediately obvious.
As we already had a soaked set of footwear each and had adequate raincoats,
we decided to go for simplicity over comfort and walked back to Central Park
along 72nd to pick up the B and get to our destination on one train. Despite
the nonsensical signage on the platform we made it to Grand Street, and met up
with the others at a cool little bar before moving on to a really cute and very
nice restaurant.
Another lovely evening in great company, very nice food and a tad too
much to drink, a great way to spend our last night in the city.
