Sunday, July 3, 2011

Today we woke up to rain and it looked like it was around to stay. After breakfast we headed out to a photography exhibit Mark wanted to see, stopping at the little tourist shop across the way for “I Love New York” umbrellas. The guy remembered me from the tshirt the day before and so gave us free “I heart New York” pins to go with the umbrellas. Armed with our umbrellas, we headed to the International Center of Photography  where we saw an exhibit on Elliot Erwitt, who did “slice of life” photography in the 1940s and 50s, as well as photographs from  Hiroshima and Ruth Gruber, who was a photojournalist who documented the story of the passengers of the ship Exodus which carried Jewish refugees in 1947. We all enjoyed these exhibits very much.

Afterwards we headed uptown on the subway to the upper west side so wecould go through Central Park. This was the same subway stop we took to go to the Natural History Museum, but this time we headed one block West into more of the residential neighborhood, and found lots of varied reasonably priced restaurants. I can certainly see the value of staying in areas like this versus Times Square! We ate at a nice little place called Cilantro, and then headed into the park. Charlotte dropped the bottom part of her umbrella into the turtle pond, but other than that it was a nice walk through.

We arrived at the Met on the upper east side, but it would be at least a two hour wait to get in so we decided to pass. We started walking back downtown hoping the kids wouldn’t notice that we weren’t hopping on a subway back to our hotel (there aren’t really any subway options here, just buses) and enjoyed looking at all of the interesting buildings. We made it all the way back down to 58th where The Plaza Hotel and FAO Schwarz are. The girls and Mark were a little hesitant to walk right into such a fancy hotel, but I remembered I’d done it before so we just walked right in and sure enough it’s set up for the casual visitor. There is a whole bunch of stuff on Eloise (the character lives at the Plaza) and shops and stuff.

After we looked around the Plaza we went over to FAO Schwarz. The kidsweren’t that impressed with the floor piano, probably because they were way too young to have ever seen Big. We all thought this Fooz table was funny though. We hung out there for a while and bought a few of those lego mini figure in packets, where you don’t know what you are getting. On the way back to the hotel we got some of those roasted nuts the vendors sell that are very yummy, and went into the Trump Tower just to ride the escalator and say we were there, and then along 5th Avenue back to our hotel. That night we went to Heartland Brewery for dinner, which was the right restaurant for our mood (casual and not too expensive). Once we got back to the hotel we realized Genevieve forgot her umbrella, so she and I went back to get it. It was actually kind of fun to walk around at night at least.

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